Creative
Ad Frequency
The average number of times each person in your target audience has seen your ad. Calculated as impressions divided by reach. Moderate weekly frequencies on Meta typically begin triggering creative fatigue for prospecting audiences. Retargeting can tolerate higher frequency because the audience already has purchase intent. Monitoring frequency at the ad set level is critical - account-level frequency averages hide individual audience oversaturation.
Why it matters
It is the mechanism behind most fatigue. Above a certain repetition the same person stops responding, and the platform keeps charging to show them the ad.
In practice
Track it per audience rather than per campaign. A blended frequency of 3 can hide a core segment seeing the ad twelve times.
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