What Is Frequency?
Frequency is the average number of times a person saw your ad within a defined window. It's the diagnostic that tells you whether your audience is under-saturated (not enough exposure to remember you) or over-saturated (fatigued, CTR collapsing).
Formula
Worked example
Over 7 days: 200,000 impressions to 40,000 unique users. Frequency = 5. That's fine for retargeting cart-abandoners (you want to be seen). It's high for cold prospecting, usually a signal to broaden audience or refresh creative.
Benchmarks
- Cold prospecting (7-day): 1.5 to 3.5 healthy; > 5 is fatigue.
- Retargeting (7-day): 5 to 12 acceptable; > 20 risks annoyance.
- Brand awareness campaigns: 3 to 8 is the sweet spot for recall.
Why it matters
Frequency is the earliest signal of creative fatigue. When frequency rises and CTR falls in the same week, the audience is saturated, refresh creative or broaden targeting before CPMs spike.
Common mistakes
- 1.Ignoring frequency until CPA breaks. By then you've burned budget.
- 2.Reading frequency in isolation, always pair with CTR trend.
- 3.Setting arbitrary frequency caps. Better to fix creative than throttle delivery.
Put Frequency to work
Free calculators
Related services
FAQs about Frequency
What's a good frequency?
Depends on campaign type. 2 to 3 on cold prospecting, 5 to 10 on retargeting. Judge by CTR trend, not the number alone.
How do I lower frequency?
Broaden audience, refresh creative, add exclusions to remove converters, or shift budget to a fresh audience.
Related terms
Number of unique users who saw your ad at least once.
Number of times your ad was rendered on a screen.
When an audience has seen the same ad enough that CTR/CVR drops.
Cost to serve 1,000 impressions, the auction's price signal.
Clicks ÷ impressions, measures how often your ad earns a click.
Meta brand-awareness metric estimating the number of people who would remember your ad within 2 days.
% of impressions your brand owns vs total category impressions.