We don’t normally highlight or focus on frequency caps with clients, just because there are a hundred other details that need to be nailed down for every flight. We do use them, and set standards to ensure that we don’t waste ad spend or drive our ads to be stale for any individual user. The idea is that you ID an audience likely in-market for your clients’ wares, then follow them around to show them your clients’ ads and when they’re ready to convert, your client is right there. At least, that’s what I’m told.

What happens if you burn your budget showing a small portion of your audience 20-30 ads every day? How wasteful might that be, and does that slice of the pie impact your overall metrics? What about ad burnout? If you show me an ad too many times, it becomes easy to ignore it, and if that’s on “day 3” of a 90-day flight, you’ve completely lost me. It’s important to run multiple creative sets, I prefer that to running a single design theme and replacing it on a cadence. Multiple creative sets also enables another optimization lever; cut the one with the lowest CTR or ‘cost per engaged site visit’, add another iteration.

DSP levers let you control what level of the ad hierarchy you’re assigning a cap to. Let’s say you’re targeting 4 or 5 distinct audiences with your ads, you’ll want a cap placed at the IO level, because your Line Items (each targeting an audience) aren’t mutually exclusive. One person is likely in multiple audiences, at least we find that to be the case, so an IO-level frequency cap is most appropriate. There’s no single way to handle it, as always it’s a unique discussion for every client and it changes over time, especially as audience sizes adjust.

You might also consider pulsing, where you leverage similar frequency caps but pause your ads every other week, for example. This can help extend the reach of a small budget, or help a limited creative set last longer on the calendar before going stale. Most clients would say they prefer that their ads are “always on”, whatever that means, but strategically speaking, pulsing on a small budget can be impactful. Keep in mind that weekly pulsing is too short a window for you to use this data to know what your website would produce with, and without ads. Paid Search is the only channel where you’ll see clean delineation; what happens when we run ads, and what happens when we don’t. Image, Video, and other formats drive consideration weeks, even months after a campaign is run.

We’re always looking for problems to solve, and we’re happy to show you how we do it. Drop us a line here or email us directly at info@whitelabeldigital.co for more info.