Frequency
Frequency is the average number of times each person saw your ad, calculated as impressions divided by reach.
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What it actually means
Frequency reveals how often your audience is being exposed to the same ad. A little repetition aids recall, but past a threshold — often around 3 to 5 within a short window for direct-response ads — additional views stop helping and start annoying, driving up CPM and tanking click-through rate. This is the mechanical cause of ad fatigue. Monitoring frequency tells you when to rotate in fresh creative or expand your audience. For broad awareness campaigns higher frequencies can be acceptable; for conversion campaigns to a small audience, a rising frequency is an early warning that performance is about to decline.
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30,000 impressions across 8,000 unique people is a frequency of 3.75.
Local audiences are small, so frequency climbs quickly. If yours passes 4–5 and results dip, swap the creative before pouring in more budget — the people have simply seen this ad enough.
Official definition
Straight from the ad platform's own help pages:
- Meta Business Help Center — Frequency (undated page; read September 26, 2026)Frequency is impressions divided by reach — the average number of times each account saw your ad. Meta says it may average 1 to 2 per ad set or be much higher, and that falling performance as frequency rises can signal ad fatigue.
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Numbers and costs
Related terms
Reach is the number of unique people who saw your ad at least once during a given time period.
An impression is counted each time your ad is displayed on screen, regardless of whether the same person sees it more than once.
Ad fatigue is the decline in ad performance that occurs when an audience has seen the same creative too many times.
Ad creative is the visual and written content of an ad — the image or video, the headline, and the copy that capture attention and communicate the offer.
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