Frequency capping is a digital marketing strategy usually requested by advertisers for psychological effects. However, it’s equally valuable for publishers looking to maximize their ad performance. Limiting how often a specific ad is displayed to an audience provides balanced ad exposure, ensuring users aren’t overwhelmed.
In this tutorial, I’ll explain frequency capping and its benefits and provide step-by-step instructions for implementing it on WordPress using Advanced Ads.
Table of Contents
What is frequency capping
Frequency capping is a method that restricts how many times a specific ad is shown to a user over a given period. Think of it as a valve, controlling the flow of your ad’s impressions to your audience. For example, if you set a cap of 2, an individual viewer will see this ad no more than two times. You can set this cap to any number over any given period.
It is well-known that the value of identical ad deliveries to a single user declines after a certain point. Therefore, the ad will eventually reach a point during a user’s visitor journey where its performance level drops beneath that of another ad in your inventory, which could potentially generate more profit.
Ideally, a frequency cap would be triggered before this sweet spot, removing that particular ad from play and prioritizing another ad, thereby improving your site’s revenue-per-mille value.
The benefits of frequency capping
Frequency capping provides several key benefits that enhance your monetization strategy. The main benefits are a better user experience, a higher click-through rate (CTR), a wider reach of your ads, and your qualification for more valuable ad campaigns.
- Improved user experience: Overexposure to the same ad can lead to ad fatigue, and result in disinterested or irritated users by forcing them to see the same ad repeatedly. It can become annoying or irritating to the viewer. This can lead to a decrease in the effectiveness of the ad campaign and ultimately result in lower conversion rates. By limiting ad exposure, this feature helps keep your audience engaged, improve their overall user experience, and prevent brand damage.
- Wider audience reach: By limiting the number of times a single user sees your ad, advertisers avoid wasting impressions on unresponsive users. Instead, you can serve their ad to fresh, engaged users. This redistribution of impressions leads to a wider audience reach and diversifies the visibility of your ads.
- Higher CTR: Since repeatedly viewing the same ads decreases CTRs, you can improve your website’s RPM by limiting their impressions.
- Advanced ad campaigns: Many advertisers today ask for frequency capping to optimize their budget. They and several networks’ terms require publishers to implement it in order to be approved for premium campaigns.
Frequency capping is a valuable tool in any online marketer’s arsenal. It strikes a balance between adequate exposure and oversaturation.
Why publishers should utilize frequency capping in their ad setup
When discussing frequency capping, it’s often explored from an advertiser’s perspective, as advertisers aim to invest their budget as effectively as possible. However, this technique can also be a sub-strategy for publishers’ ad optimization. Ultimately, both parties want to achieve the highest click and conversion rates possible.
While a single advertiser primarily aims to manage their budget, publishers naturally prioritize their own site’s revenue-per-mille (RPM) performance. Being the one in control of the ad setup, they can portion the reach of a particular advertiser’s creative, switch to a different one of the same customer, or even hand over the spot to another client.
In addition, premium campaign advertisers with substantial budgets expect their publishers to support this technology.
How to set up frequency capping in WordPress
With Advanced Ads Pro, you can implement frequency capping into your ad setup in just a few steps. The “Max. ad Impressions” Visitor Condition is the key tool for setting up this option. To make this condition available, navigate to Dashboard > Advanced Ads > Settings > Pro and activate the module “Advanced visitor conditions”.
You can choose whether to add this condition to individual ads or entire placements, such as the PopUp and Layer Ads placement. If you’re using a caching plugin on your website, please ensure that Cache Busting is activated for the element whose impressions you want to limit.
Please remember that Advanced Ads will no longer show an ad or placement with activated frequency capping to the user who hits the limit. With pop-up ads, for instance, this behavior is usually desired to prevent a user from seeing this rather intrusive format too frequently.
However, the situation is different for individual ads inserted into the content and whose delivery you limit using the Visitor Condition. In this case, you miss out on a valuable ad impression at close to no cost to user experience. Therefore, ensure that you set up a fallback ad or an entire fallback group for these frequency-capped ads.
Setting up frequency capping for a single ad
If you choose to limit the impressions of a single ad, follow these steps:
- Navigate to Dashboard > Advanced Ads > Ads.
- Open the ad you want to edit.
- Add the “Max. Ad Impressions” visitor condition.
- Set the desired value, e.g., 2 impressions within 86,400 seconds (one day).
- Save the ad.
Frequency capping is now activated for this ad.
Setting up frequency capping for a placement
In specific ad setups, it may be preferable to apply frequency capping to the entire placement, e.g., to a Sticky or Popup placement, instead of limiting several individual ads. This way, any single ad or all ads of a group assigned to this ad space will share the same cap. Here’s how to do it:
- Navigate to Dashboard > Advanced Ads > Placements.
- Open the advanced options of the placement you want to edit.
- Add the “Max. Ad Impressions” visitor condition.
- Set the desired value, e.g., 2 impressions within 3,600 seconds (one hour).
- Save the placement..
Frequency capping is now active for the entire placement.
Conclusion on frequency capping
Frequency capping, often seen as an advertising strategy, also holds great potential for publishers in ad optimization. This parameter limits the number of times a specific ad is shown to a user, preventing ad fatigue and ensuring better audience engagement.
In this guide, we explored the benefits of frequency capping for publishers, which align with those of advertisers—improving click and conversion rates.
By implementing a well-thought-out cap strategy with Advanced Ads on their website, publishers can maximize their revenue-per-mille value and qualify for more premium campaigns.
Frequently asked questions about frequency capping
In simple terms, frequency capping is a strategy that limits the number of times a specific ad is shown to a user over a designated period.
Testing is crucial to ascertain the optimal frequency cap for your website. Monitor your impressions closely and identify when customer interactions drop off and the Click-Through Rate (CTR) falls below your website’s average. That’s your cue!
Yes, indeed. You can assign different frequency capping values to various ads within a single campaign. This can come in handy, especially when certain ads are more susceptible to cause ad fatigue or if each ad is targeting a distinct audience.