What Is Facebook Ad Frequency and Why Is It Important?

Sometimes it feels like your Facebook feed has become a giant bulletin board.

You’ve been seeing more ads than posts from your friends, and at some point your feed just became, well, very annoying. In fact, you might have even promised yourself you’ll never buy a certain product, just because Facebook won’t stop showing you the ad.

Want to prevent your business from losing customers like this? Time to learn what Facebook ad frequency is and why it matters for your brand.

What Is Facebook Ad Frequency?

Let’s put it real simple: frequency is an estimated metric that shows you the average number of times a Facebook user has seen your ad in their feed. If you want to calculate your Facebook ad frequency, you can use the following formula:

Number of impressions/Reach

Here, the number of impressions refers to the total number of displays of your ad. This is regardless of whether it was displayed to the same user who already saw it. 

Reach represents the number of individual newsfeeds on which Facebook has displayed your ad.

Why Is Facebook Ad Frequency Important for You?

In a survey conducted by Databox, 69% of respondents said that they paid attention to this metric when running Facebook Ad campaigns. And almost 60% consider it an important metric to measure. 

Why is that the case? Here are several reasons why frequency is important for your ad performance on Facebook:

1. It Affects Your Relevance Score

And what is Facebook relevance score again? You can calculate it based on the number of positive and negative reactions your ad gets. If many people watch your ad and have overall positive reactions to it, you’ll have a high relevance score.

However, if the ad keeps reappearing to the same people again and again, chances are they’ll get tired of it and stop interacting. They may even hide or report the ad, which will lower your relevance score.

And how does this score even help your campaign? Well, it decreases your CPC, or indicates that your ad’s creative needs a bit of refreshment. It can be particularly useful if you’re doing split testing – and tell you which ad is resonating better with your audience.

2. It Tells You About Your Ad’s Performance

Is your frequency higher than five since the very beginning of your ad campaign? It may be a red flag to consider digging into further. High Facebook ad frequency indicates that you’re either targeting the wrong audience or that your message hasn’t really found its way through. Your audience also may be too small, so the same people keep seeing the ad again and again.

Remember that running your ad will become more expensive as the frequency numbers increase – meaning your CPA will soon follow. In fact, an analysis by AdEspresso has shown that an ad with a frequency of nine, cost 161.7% more per click than an ad with a frequency of one.

Find the Right Balance

It may take some time to determine the best Facebook ad frequency for your brand, but it’s an essential metric you should pay attention to if you want to optimize the performance of your Facebook ads campaigns.

Keeping the ad frequency low is just as important as reaching the right audience, because even the most loyal customers will leave if they feel overwhelmed by your ad constantly appearing in their newsfeed.

The first step toward striking a balance is properly monitoring this metric when running a Facebook ad campaign, and making timely adjustments.