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. 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. Right?

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.

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 necessary. There’s no single way to handle it, as always it’s a unique discussion for every client and it changes over time.