Ad Frequency is the average number of times a target audience user sees your ad. It’s a nifty measurement that allows you to know how your audience interacts with your ad, and how many times you should show your ad to a user before they take action.
You have questions, we hear you. Here are our answers:
Why is my Ad Frequency Score So Important?
It’s important to pay your ad frequency score the acknowledgment it deserves. The consequences… aren’t great. Too low, and it means your ad isn’t being seen enough, wasting your money and effort in advertising. Alternatively, too high, and your basically really annoying people and it will generate poor feedback from your audience.
Ad Frequency + Ad Relevance
If a user sees your ad too many times, they have the option to hide it from a dropdown menu, where Facebook will ask them to specify what they don’t like about it. If the user selects “Not Relevant to Me”, your relevancy score will go down. If your relevancy score performs negatively, Facebook will favour showing competitor ads over your own, thus decreasing your ad reach.
In most cases, the higher the frequency, the lower the relevance score, and vice versa. It’s important to note that people who engage with your ads (handily!) make the relevancy score go up.
What is an optimal Ad Frequency?
Our rule of thumb is this:
- For retargeting, an ideal ad frequency result is 2.0 per day
- For cold audience ads, an ad frequency of 1.0 per day is sufficient
The best way to check this is to look at a 7-day view of your campaign performance.
Helpfully, Facebook will optimise frequency for a single delivery option: website clicks, unique daily reach, or impressions. You can select these options in the Optimisation and Pricing set-up section.
For any other set-up, Frequency is a rather manual process. Keep an eye on your results, and if your score creeps too high, test some new ads and audiences until you find your ad sweet spot.
