Facebook Ad Frequency 101

Let’s talk Facebook ad frequency: what it means, how to analyze it, and the importance of date ranges when determining success!

Here’s Facebook Ads Manager, where you can see a recent campaign running.

If you scroll over, you’ll see this column Frequency. Frequency is the average number of times each person saw your ad, and it’s an estimated metric, not exact.

When you look here, this month, December 1st through the 13th, our frequency is 1.84, 5.53 on the traffic campaign, 1.51, 3.30, and 2.17.

What does that mean? People on average have seen the First Touch Messages ads in this campaign 1.84 times in the last 13 days, from December 1st to the 13th.

For the Retargeting Traffic ads, the frequency is 5.53, which means that over the course of 13 days they’ve seen an ad five times from Outdoor Adventure Marketing.

Now I’m going to start changing the time frames so that you can see how the frequencies change.

First, I’m going to look at the results from the last 30 days.

Before the Retargeting Traffic ad frequency is 5.53. Now it went up to 6.76, but that’s over a longer period. What that means is that it was being distributed more evenly in the first couple of weeks, and then in the last few weeks, it’s getting more heavily served.

Remember: 6.76 over 30 days makes the frequency less often because it’s approximately once every five days or so. Whereas before, we were at once every two or three days. That’s a very interesting pattern that we would want to know about!

Now if I switch the time period over to just yesterday, you’ll see that, on average, people are seeing the First Touch Traffic ad twice in one day, which is not exactly ideal.

Now, we switch over to a seven-day period to review:

ParaCore Tip: Over a seven-day period, we like to see Facebook ad frequency somewhere between 1 and 2.

First Touch Traffic is at 2.78, which means that they’ve seen the ad on average three times over the course of a week.

But 3.52 for retargeting? That’s starting to get a little too high.

Why? When you have a smaller audience and a small, narrow target, you don’t want to harass and be annoying. Personally, I hate seeing ads once or twice a day from the same company for weeks on end.

This number is telling me that our audience list is a little bit too small for the size of budget we have based on the frequency we want to hit.

If you decrease the budget, then Facebook will moderate and only then serve the ad the appropriate number of times for your budget.

So, in this case, the 3.52, if I want to cut that in half? The budget on here is $2 per day, so if I decrease this to $1 dollar per day, then frequency would be even lower.

So, in summary for Facebook Ad Frequency 101:

• Frequency is the average number of times each person saw your ad in the selected date range.  
• There are two different ways to adjust frequency: first, through your budget, and second, through the audience size.
• With frequency, the period of time you’re looking at is incredibly important when making any changes. 

Still confused? Reach out to us for some guidance!