As a media buyer, you’re gonna be able to use a lotta tools when creating a campaign. One of them is called frequency capping, and it can be applied to a campaign, ad or spot.

What is Frequency Capping?

Frequency capping is putting a limit on the number of times an ad is shown to an individual. In Google AdWords, you can enter a maximum ‘cap’ on how many times someone can potentially see a display campaign.

You can set these caps at the campaign, ad group, and ad level and further segment them by day, week, or month.

Why Use Frequency Capping?

Ads are like cilantro: some people love ‘em, some people hate ‘em, and others need some convincing. Everybody responds to ad creatives differently, so it’s another factor to test out.

You want your ads to hit the sweet spot between “dude, stop following me around!” and “I’ve never heard of you guys.”

How Should you Use the Frequency Capping Tool?

It’s a very useful tool when you’re buying on a CPM basis (cost per one thousand impressions) and you’re receiving by conversion, lead or sale.

As your main goal is leading the user to the conversion, you can restrict your costs by paying only for the impressions that are most likely to give you more revenues.

If a user sees a banner many times and doesn’t click on it, you can’t expect it’ll do it in the near future and so you don’t need to pay for that impression forever.

What’s the Optimal Ad Frequency Cap?

There’s no rule of thumb. The best indicator of future performance is looking at your historical ad frequency data. You can do exactly that by setting up and digging into you ad frequency reports.

How to Set Up Frequency Capping in Ads?

Here is how:

  1. Open AdWords
  2. Open up a Display campaign
  3. Click the Settings tab
  4. Click on All Settings
  5. Scroll down and click + Ad Delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping
  6. Next to Frequency Capping, click edit
  7. Input your viewable impressions per day, per month, per campaign or per ad
Short conclusion

The changes in the frequency capping are crucial when you’re trying to increase or limit your inventory.

For example, if you identify a period of the day/week in your campaign that performs better than others, you can increase the capping for that period to gain more impressions – basically, this means you work with the dayparting.

Be careful with changes in the frequency capping as they only work when you’re in a profitable position.