Dean Donaldson, Director of Digital Experience at Eyeblaster, was recently interviewed on the trends in digital marketing by Martin Meyer-Gossner, co-founder of silicon.de, at DMEXCO. Gossner’s full blog can be read at The Strategy Web here.

Frequency is hard to balance.  Stretch your campaign too thin—and too few exposures per user may result in low retention of your marketing message.  Advertise with too few publishers and in a short timeline—and too many exposures may result in precious impressions over-targeting your exposed users rather than seeking additional fresh minds.  While the theory sounds logical, it requires a relatively high volume of impressions to have the flexibility to optimize frequency.

It is clear that frequency is highly dependent on the volume of impressions of the ad.  The more impressions served, the higher the likelihood that a user will bump into the same ad more than once.  However, impressions need to reach a certain threshold for the frequency to start increasing.

An analysis conducted by Eyeblaster Research indicates that advertisers with ads that were served for less than 4 million impressions would find it hard to achieve an average frequency that is higher than 2.5 exposures per user.  Only above this threshold advertisers can significantly increase the number of exposures per user.  Limiting frequency is easy; agencies can decide to cap the number of impressions for a single user in the ad serving system.

On average, a user is exposed to an ad 2.2 times.  However, this figure does not portray the full picture.  75% of ads had an average frequency of lower than 2.2, and 50% of ads had a frequency of lower than 1.6. What pushes the average frequency upwards are ads served at very high volumes reaching very high average frequencies.

Thus, for an average ad, advertisers should expect a frequency of lower than the average frequency of 2.2.  Advertisers and agencies may not have as much leeway of increasing the frequency of the average ad as they hope.  Only when the number of impressions served becomes high, average frequency may grow in tandem. 

Frequency of an ad is only a partial measure, as users may be exposed to other ads belonging to the same campaign. 

This is the first posting in a series on this topic.  In the next few postings we will explore frequency at the campaign level and its effect on campaign effectiveness.

Ariel Geifman | Research Analyst