5 Ways to Control Frequency in Facebook Ads
Advertisers have long been waiting for Facebook to introduce frequency capping, a feature that should have been part of the core advertising portfolio of Facebook Ads. Despite the fact that Facebook promises their advertisers that they have set up sophisticated algorithms to prevent ads from being shown to the same person too often we’ve all seen the examples of the contrary happening. With Facebook regularly releasing new features but still lacking a decent frequency capping option I suppose it’s safe to say we shouldn’t be expecting it anytime soon.
So what can we do in order to get our frequencies in Facebook ads under control? There’s actually a couple of things to tray to constrain frequency in Facebook. Some of them may seem obvious to some but surprisingly simple to others. I’ve come up with a list of the top 5most effective ways to control frequency in Facebook ads:
- Use reach as campaign objective
- Disable desktop right column ads
- Lower your ad set budget
- Utilize automated rules
- Exclude engagement audiences
1. Use reach a s campaign objective
While this one may seem either very obvious or irrelevant to your campaign objective: Facebook actually offers a campaign objective that let’s you set a frequency cap for your ads:
This option works mostly if your actual campaign objective is reaching the maximum amount of people. If your actual objective is increasing conversions on your website or promoting a product catalog this is not an option.
2. Disable Desktop Right Column ads
The ad type that appears on desktop browsers in the top right column usually generate a lot of impressions and have a much lower CTR compared to news feed placements. Chances are that when you look into the individual placements’ performance in your campaign that the desktop right column ads are the biggest contributors to your impressions and therefore also your reach. To find these stats per placement perform a breakdown by placement and check the columns for impressions, reach and most importantly frequency:
Disabling desktop right column ads will bring down your frequency but also limits the exposure of your campaigns. If your audiences are large enough you could split up your placements in different ad sets in order to gain control over each placement. By doing this you can specify a different bid, budget or bidding strategy for each placement according to it’s results.
3. Lower your ad set budget
Unlike Google AdWords the budget you choose for your ad set partly determines how often your ads get served to the same people. I’ve often seen frequencies skyrocket after increasing an ad set’s budget while other metrics (including reach, link clicks or conversions) and the campaign’s overall performance didn’t change. Facebook will try to spend as much of your budget keeping the chosen campaign objective in mind. For certain campaign objectives this means Facebook will serve your ads more often to the same people just to spend your money. Depending on your actual objective this may be the opposite of what you want meaning decreasing your ad set’s budget will have impact your ad’s frequency. The only way to figure out the optimal budget for each ad set is by trying out several budgets and see what works best for your target audience.
4. Utilize automated rules
Automated rules have only been introduced recently by Facebook and appeared to be your best option when you want to control the frequency of your ads. However, there’s a catch when setting these up: the rules only let you receive a notification or turn off ads altogether based on a certain frequency. This means your ad won’t serve again until you (manually) reactivate your ad:
Seeing as there’s also no option at all to reactivate ads using rules you’ll always have to act manually to prevent all ads from being turned off. There’s an option to let Facebook send you a notification in Facebook’s notification center or by email to let you know that the ads you setup the rules for have reached the given frequency and then let you decide what you want to do with it.
5. Exclude engagement audiences
Another fairly recently added feature by Facebook is “Engagement Audiences” in the audiences section. This is a custom audience type that lets you “Create a list of people who have engaged with your content on Facebook”. This can either be your Video, Lead Ad, Canvas “Create a list of people who have interacted with your Page on Facebook”. These audiences are very interesting to use in your targeting for your campaigns but can also be used to exclude people who have interacted with your ads:
The down side of this technique is that this audience does not include people who saw your ad but did not click on it or interacted with it in any other way. Excluding this audience will only prevent people who did interact with your ad to see your ad again. There’s also no way to set a limit to how many times someone must have interacted with your ad, as soon as the have they will be excluded. Also this means people who interacted with a normal page post and don’t necessarily have to have seen or interacted with your ad will be excluded from seeing your ads. This could make you miss out on a certain part of your target audience, of course you could target this audience in another ad set to eliminate this issue and make sure you reach everyone.
What do you think?
There’s lots of ways that lead to Rome and the same goes for Facebook ads. Do you have any other methods that work well in controlling frequency on Facebook? Let me know in the comments!
