EMBiz: The Ideal Meta Ad Frequency

Hi, Cody here, Content Director at Elevate My Brand. I want to talk about the ideal ad frequency on Meta. Meta, of course, being the parent company that owns and operates Facebook and Instagram. Even though ad frequency is a sort of lesser discussed metric when it comes to social advertising, it is a question we get sometimes from clients, which is, what is the ideal ad frequency? 

What is ad frequency?

Let's take a step back and talk about what ad frequency is. Ad frequency is the average number of times that a user who sees your ad sees your ad. So if 100 people see your ad, 50 of them see it twice and 50 of them see it four times, your average ad frequency is going to be three times. The reason why we look at this is because we want to know essentially how many touch points it takes for people to actually make a decision or to convert. So that's what ad frequency is and why we might look at that as a metric. 

The ideal Meta ad frequency

The real question that we get is what is the ideal ad frequency? And unfortunately, the answer is it depends. It depends on a number of factors. In fact, first, it depends on your industry. So whether you are B2B or B2C or even if within B2C, if you're like tech brand or if you're a CPG brand, it really depends on you and your industry. It also depends very largely on your pricing. If you are a luxury good, then it might take far more times for a customer to see your ad to be motivated to take that decision. Whereas a company that sells a $10 product, there's really no risk in just trying that $10 product. Maybe the average ad frequency will be one or two, because the barrier to making that decision is much lower. What's most important is that you run several different campaigns and you optimize as much as you can on the content side and then just watch the average frequency on your ads to see if it goes up or down. 

Technicalities of note

Note that it won't always be just your content and things you can control. Talking about pricing, for instance, a lot of times you can use the ad frequency to determine, like, economic fluctuations, right? Maybe when the economy gets worse, we generally see that it takes more times for people to see your ad before they'll take action. So there's a lot at play. That's not just things you can control in terms of your content, but there are a lot of juicy insights that can come out of your average ad frequency on Meta.

Instagram & Facebook ad frequency best practices

To answer your question a little bit more directly and concretely: we generally say that Instagram and Facebook ad frequency best practices 2 to 4 times. But again, it's most important that you watch your ad frequency and let what happens and fluctuates within your meta ad account determine what you need to do in terms of content. 

Setting bid caps

The little tidbit and insight that I'll leave you with is that once you have optimized over time, ran several campaigns and you've determined what your ad frequency generally is, and you determine what you set as sort of like best value of like, oh well, I don't want our customers. I don't want people who have seen it seven times and aren't going to make a decision because our product is only $20. If that's what you've set the cap as, you can technically set that cap in your Meta Ads Manager so that your ad never shows to people more times than you want it to.

That's all about meta ad frequency and what you can do once you've optimized your campaigns to set that cap and what you need to watch for in terms of like, metrics and elements to make those decisions. Does this all sound like too much to handle? Let our paid social media experts take over.