What is frequency?
Frequency is the average number of times each person in your audience saw your ad during a period, found by dividing impressions by the number of people reached.
Formula
Frequency = impressions ÷ people reached
Worked example, not a result
The same budget spread over too few people
Say a campaign delivers 57,200 impressions in a week to 11,000 people. Frequency is 5.2, so the average person in that audience saw the ad about five times in seven days.
Whether that is too much depends on who they are. For people who added something to the cart yesterday, several reminders in a week is normal and often works. For a cold audience meeting the brand for the first time, it is a lot, and the impressions after the first few are mostly buying irritation.
The useful part is what frequency explains. When cost per thousand impressions climbs and click through falls on a campaign nobody touched, frequency is usually the reason. Either the audience is too small for the budget, or the same creative has been running long enough to become invisible. Both have obvious answers: widen the audience, or bring in a new idea.
The figures here are an example.
Why it matters
Frequency is the fastest diagnostic for a paid social campaign that is quietly getting worse. It separates a creative problem from an audience size problem, and those two account for most unexplained declines on the visitors lever.
It also puts a practical limit on budget. A campaign can only spend so much against a given audience before it is simply showing the same people the same ad more often, which raises cost and lowers response at the same time. Knowing that limit is what stops a store pouring budget into a campaign that has already reached everyone it can usefully reach.
For a store owner the decision it drives is which way to expand. If frequency is high and the audience is small, the answer is a wider audience. If frequency is high because the same ad has run for weeks, the answer is new creative. Adding budget without answering that question makes both problems worse.
Common mistakes
- Applying one acceptable level to every audience. A warm cart abandoner and a first time viewer tolerate completely different amounts of repetition.
- Ignoring it until results drop. Frequency climbs steadily and visibly, and it is one of the few metrics that warns you before the damage shows up in revenue.
- Building audiences too narrow for the budget. Precision feels responsible and produces punishing repetition once the spend arrives.
- Counting it per campaign when several campaigns share an audience. The person on the other end sees the total, not your account structure.
Related terms and answers
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