It feels like the most common advertising trope always follows the same structure:
“Your customer needs to see your ads [4/5/6/7/146] times in order to [remember you/make a purchase/some other desired action]”.
NB: This is an article from GCommerce
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This statement might make sense logically, but what does it actually mean and how do we control it?
The answer to these questions lies within a little looked at metric: Frequency.
Frequency is actually easy to understand and calculate. Frequency is the number of times a user has seen your ad or campaign in a certain period of time. In order to find frequency, you divide impressions by reach.
For example, let’s say your campaign had 100,000 impressions this month and reached 20,000 people. Your frequency is 5.00, meaning that the average person your campaign reached saw your marketing materials five times. Some may have seen it four times, while others may have had six exposures, but it all averages out to five.
- Impressions/reach
- 100,000/20,000 = 5.00
What’s a good frequency?
A desirable frequency primarily depends on the goals of your campaign. For the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to focus on Meta advertising on Facebook and Instagram, but a lot of these concepts transfer over to other platforms you’re advertising on.
For a prospecting campaign where we’re hoping to drive website traffic or website engagement, a good frequency to target is 1 to 2.5.
In our campaigns, we’ve seen that anything higher than about 2.5 results in a reduced click-through rate and less website traffic that can be used to serve ads that drive bookings later.
If your frequency is approaching 2.5, it is a good sign that your prospecting targeting is too narrow for your budget; try targeting a larger geographic region, more age groups, or more interest groups in order to increase the reach of your campaign.
For a retargeting campaign where we’re driving conversions on a hotel’s booking engine, the range of a good frequency is a little broader, from 2.5 to 9.
Out of an analysis of 80 retargeting campaigns during Q2 of this year, we identified some key insights:
