Frequency
How hard you're working one audience, and how close it is to tuning your ad out.
What it means
Frequency is the average number of times one person saw your ad over the selected period. It's impressions divided by reach — a ratio, not a percentage — and both halves are counted by Meta, so it won't reconcile with Shopify. Lower means your budget is still finding new faces; higher means you're paying to reach the same people again.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Impressions is every time the ad rendered on a screen, repeat views included.
Reach is the unique people behind those impressions, counted by Meta — it won't reconcile with Shopify, and isn't meant to.
Worked example. An ad set spends €3,000 in a month. That buys 120,000 impressions and reaches 40,000 people. Frequency = 120,000 ÷ 40,000 = 3. The average person in that audience saw your ad three times for their share of the €3,000.
Reach is the half that's hard to move. Double the budget on the same audience and impressions double while reach barely shifts, so Frequency doubles with it. That's why a budget rise shows up here within days.
It answers the question
Has this audience seen the ad so many times that they've stopped noticing it? Frequency climbing means your budget is buying repeat views instead of new people.
Why it matters
Frequency is the earliest warning that a campaign is wearing out. It moves before purchases do, and for a reason you can act on: the audience is too small for the money going through it. It's the assistant who asks the same shopper if they need help for the fifth time — useful once, ignored by then.
The pattern to watch is Frequency climbing while CTR (Link)CTR (Link)How enticing your ad is to the people who see it.1.5% or more is healthy falls. That's creative fatigue, and it costs you twice: fewer people click, and CPC (Link)CPC (Link)The cost of each site visit from Meta. rises because the same spend is buying fewer clicks.
What good looks like
Judge this per ad set, not per account. A retargeting pool of 5,000 people runs high by design and that's fine while it converts; a broad prospecting set at 5 is a real problem. The honest test is whether CTR (Link)CTR (Link)How enticing your ad is to the people who see it.1.5% or more is healthy is holding at the same time.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Broaden the audience | Strip narrow interest stacks and raise the lookalike percentage on your top ad set | Frequency down 0.5–1.5 | 3–5 days | The new people know you less well, so CPC (Link) and cost per purchase usually rise for a week before they settle. |
| Fast Cut budget on the smallest ad sets | Cap spend where the audience is under 50,000 people — retargeting fatigues fastest | Frequency down within days | 1 week | You're cutting the cheapest purchases in the account. Revenue falls the same week, even though efficiency looks better. |
| Slow Refresh creative on a schedule | Ship 3 new hooks every 2 weeks so spend keeps moving to something the audience hasn't seen | Frequency resets, CTR (Link) recovers | 2–4 weeks | Production time and budget, and many new ads lose to the one they replace — running them splits spend away from a proven winner. |
| Slow Open new placements or markets | Add Reels and Audience Network, or a neighbouring country, to grow the pool itself | Frequency structurally lower | 1 quarter | ROAS drops while the account relearns, and a new market needs shipping and returns sorted before the ads are the problem. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Frequency alone tells you how hard you're working an audience. Next to the click rate, it tells you whether the audience or the creative is the thing to change.
Working and still growing
You're reaching new people and they're clicking. This is the only corner where more money is the obvious answer.
Strong ad, crowded room
The creative is good but the pool is too small for the spend. You have a few weeks before the click rate starts to slide.
New people, wrong message
Fresh eyes are seeing this and not clicking. The audience isn't tired — the ad isn't landing.
Textbook fatigue
The same people have seen it too many times and stopped reacting. Every extra day costs more per click than the last.
Together they say whether the ads are still prospecting or just circling the people you already have. Frequency rising while your New Customer share falls means you're paying Meta to reach buyers who were coming anyway. Alone, high Frequency could be healthy retargeting and a low New Customer share could be strong repeat business.
This separates the ad from the shop. Frequency climbing while Purchase To View Rate holds steady means your site is fine and the creative is the whole problem. Both sliding together means you're sending tired traffic to a page that was already struggling.
Common misreads
That figure averages every audience together, and an ad set sitting at 8 disappears inside it. Sort the Campaigns table by Frequency, highest first, and read the top rows.
There is no total. Frequency is impressions divided by reach, and reach counts unique people — so adding rows counts anyone who saw two of your ads more than once. Read each row on its own.
Frequency falls whenever you cut budget or the audience grows, with no change to the ad at all. Confirm CTR (Link) recovered too — a lower number with a flat click rate only means you spent less.
Also called
Ad frequency · impressions per person · average frequency
See yoursYour Frequency by campaign and by ad, for the last 30 days.
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