Consumers today are subjected to a tremendous amount of advertising. Whether they’re scrolling social media or watching their favorite shows, we’re all exposed to countless marketing messages in short periods of time.
What Is Frequency Capping?
To ensure your business stands out from the competition, it’s necessary to create multiple marketing touchpoints, since when your target audience repeatedly sees ads, social media posts, and other messaging about your business, they’re more likely to remember you and convert to paying customers. But, it’s a double-edged sword: If customers see your ads too often, they can experience ad fatigue, and you can waste your marketing budget. That’s why frequency capping — the act of limiting the reach and frequency of your advertising — is essential in ensuring your ads remain effective and maximize the chances of customer conversion.
How Does Frequency Capping Work?
When you schedule an ad campaign, you can also set a frequency cap. That cap limits the number of times an individual user sees a specific ad. If you’re running a display campaign, you can set a cap to limit the number of daily, weekly, or monthly impressions an individual user receives. You can also set frequency caps for video campaigns in the same way.
Frequency capping gives you valuable control of how your ads are displayed. You can set different caps for different ads, and you can also adjust the cap based on your campaign’s performance.
Why Is Frequency Capping Important?
Frequency capping is important when you’re targeting ads to reach a certain user base. For example, if you’re implementing ad retargeting on social media, you can set your ads to reach an audience based on demographic information like their location, occupation, and interests. Your target audience will then see your ads several times.
Frequency capping, also called impression capping, will limit the number of times that individual customers see each ad. It has several important benefits:
Prevents Ad Fatigue
Frequency capping helps avoid situations where customers see an ad so many times that they become frustrated by it. This ad fatigue can cause your customers to start perceiving your brand in a negative light. By capping your ad frequency, you can make sure that the ad retains its effectiveness, rather than potentially driving customers away.
Enhances the Customer Experience
Similarly, frequency capping can improve the customer’s overall user experience. That positive experience may contribute to a more favorable perception of your brand. It also means that, when customers do see your ads, they’re more likely to engage with them.
Maximizes Campaign Effectiveness
Frequency capping can help maximize the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. When ads are still new and fresh, customers are more likely to click on them, which can increase your click-through rates and conversion rates.
Optimizes Your Marketing Budget
An ad frequency cap helps ensure that your ad is displayed to a broader audience, rather than excessively displaying the ad to a smaller portion of your audience. This helps optimize your marketing budget, so your ad spend is more likely to have a positive effect and lead to conversions.
What Is the Importance of Ad Frequency?
As discussed, ad frequency — the number of times your ad is shown to a single user over a set period of time — can affect the impact of your marketing. You can calculate ad frequency by dividing the total number of ad impressions by the number of individuals the ad reached. If your ad was displayed 20,000 times and reached 10,000 users, the ad frequency is two impressions per person.
Ad frequency is important for several reasons: Your ad has to stand out from significant advertising competition, and repeatedly showing the ad can help your audience notice and remember it. If your ad frequency is too low, the ad might not have the impact needed to convert your audience. If your ad frequency is too high, your audience can become tired of it and stop engaging with it.
Choosing an appropriate ad frequency can also help you wisely budget your ad spend. By controlling the frequency, you can avoid wasting money by displaying the ad to your audience too many times, which can cause the ad to be ineffective.
Frequency Capping Examples
Businesses implement frequency capping in many ways to maximize the success of their marketing campaigns and better connect with their target audience. Here are a few examples of how businesses can use frequency capping:
Marketing Assisted Living to Older Adults
An assisted living community targets older adults with ads about their residences and services. Knowing that older adults may not be receptive to repeated messaging, the community lowers its frequency capping to keep its ads effective without overwhelming its audience.
Marketing Pet Food Across Multiple Platforms
A pet food brand launches a new food and creates a marketing campaign encompassing multiple social media and video streaming platforms. They implement frequency capping across all of the platforms to avoid the same audience seeing the ads too many times.
Launching a New Sneaker
A top sneaker brand launches a new sneaker. They increase their frequency cap to rapidly build awareness of the sneaker to create buzz and excitement around the release. The brand’s target market is a younger demographic that’s likely to be more receptive to repeated ad views.
How Is the Optimal Frequency Cap Determined?
“The ideal frequency cap depends on the campaign type, objectives, and audience size,” explains Yoav Shaham, data and measurement team lead at Taboola. “A larger audience may allow for a slightly higher cap without negatively affecting reach, whereas a niche audience might require tighter controls.”
Since the optional frequency cap will vary, it’s best to test your campaigns. When you run an ad campaign, monitor when audience interaction with ads drops off and use a frequency cap to see if you can sustain interaction and prevent further drop-off. You may need to repeatedly test and experiment with different frequency caps before you find the optimal cap.
How Is Frequency Capping Related to Audience Reach?
“When you set a frequency cap, you limit the number of impressions per user,” says Shaham. “This helps prevent overexposure, but it also means that your campaign may serve fewer total impressions if your audience size is limited. In other words, a tighter cap maximizes unique reach, but might reduce the total number of ad exposures, whereas a looser cap increases exposure per user, but can reduce the number of unique users reached.”
According to Shaham, it’s ideal to strike the right balance between frequency and reach. “A possible approach is to begin your calculation by estimating how many times you would like a single user to view your ad,” he says. From there, you can determine the frequency cap that’s appropriate for your audience size.
Frequency Capping Best Practices
Start with a Conservative Cap
When you’re just starting out, keep your cap tighter to avoid wasting funds and overspending on ads. Based on your ad conversions and performance, you can gradually increase the cap and review the performance again.
Monitor Your Audience and Adjust
Finding the right frequency cap takes time and careful monitoring. Pay close attention to how your audience is engaging with your ad, adjust the cap, and review the data again. The type of ad will also affect the ideal cap, so be prepared to test and adjust the cap when you introduce new ads. If you have access to an ad platform utilizing a performance-focused AI to monitor the results, this will make real-time optimization much faster and easier.
Adjust Caps Based on Seasonal Trends or Events
Frequency caps aren’t stagnant, and they can be affected by seasonal trends and events. For example, if you’re marketing a product that’s an ideal Christmas gift, you can increase your frequency cap in the weeks leading up to Christmas to build awareness and drive sales. The same is true around shopping events like Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day.
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Frequency Capping Terms
It’s helpful to understand these common terms used when discussing frequency capping:
Ad Fatigue
Ad fatigue refers to a user’s decreased engagement with your ad after they’ve seen it repeatedly and have grown tired of it. Ad fatigue can occur when your frequency cap is too high and your ads are repeatedly shown to the same individuals.
Impressions
Impressions are a valuable marketing metric. Each impression occurs when an individual is shown your ad, regardless of whether they click on or engage with the ad.
Cap Impression Frequency
Cap impression frequency refers to the number of times an ad is shown to individuals. The cap limits the ad from being shown to individual users an excessive number of times and can help prevent ad fatigue.
Cap View Frequency
Cap view frequency is the number of times the same individual views or interacts with an ad. The cap view frequency can help you monitor your audience’s interest levels, so you can adjust your frequency caps.
Time Capping
Time capping limits the time frame in which an ad is shown. For example, you could set an ad to appear during certain daytime hours, so it reaches users during times when they’re likely to be most receptive to it.
Key Takeaways
While repeated ad views can help make your business and messaging memorable, showing your ads too many times can lead to ad fatigue and an ineffective campaign. Frequency capping can help you control the number of times individuals see your ads so you can maximize their impact and keep up your click-through and conversion rates. While finding that optimal frequency cap will take a bit of trial and error, it can pay off with a more effective ad campaign and an optimized marketing budget.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the best frequency capping for interstitial ads?
Interstitial ads, which are full-screen ads that appear when users are navigating apps or websites, pop up before a user can access the content. These ads are prominent, but if they’re over-displayed, users can become frustrated and may stop using the apps or websites. Google has set a fixed frequency cap that prevents the same interstitial ad from being shown to the same user more than once per hour, per subdomain.
How can frequency capping assist with marketing efforts?
Frequency capping can help make your marketing campaigns more effective, since your audience is more likely to engage with ads when they haven’t seen them so many times that they’ve become frustrated with them. A frequency cap helps ensure you’re using your marketing budget wisely and aren’t overspending on ads that will have little effectiveness.
How can you determine what the best ad frequency is?
There’s a general rule that an ad frequency of three gives your audience a chance to get familiar with your brand without overwhelming them with a repetitive ad. This frequency can be a good starting point, but you’ll also want to consider your campaign type, objectives, and audience size when determining the ideal frequency cap. Monitor your campaign metrics closely and be prepared to adjust your ad frequency depending on how the campaign performs.
