Google AdWords allows you to limit the frequency of a display campaign, i.e. how often one user can be exposed to one of your ads. Especially for remarketing campaigns this can be useful to optimise user experience and profitability.

Step 1: How to analyse frequency metrics in your campaigns

The frequency metric can only be viewed at the campaign level (not ad group level):

Campaign -> Columns -> Customize Columns -> Reach Metrics -> Add “Unique Cookies” and “Avg. Impression Frequency Per Cookie”

Here are some explanations on “Unique Cookies” and “Avg. Impression Frequency Per Cookie”:

Unique Cookies: This column displays the number of unique cookies that were exposed to your ad over a given time period. You can use this information to estimate how many people were shown your ad.

Good to know: Unique cookies aren’t the same as unique users. If your ad is shown twice on a single device, it only counts as one unique cookie. This could apply even if multiple people use the device. Also, a single person may count as multiple cookies if they use multiple devices, have certain browser settings, or both.

Avg. Impression Frequency Per Cookie: This column displays the average number of times a unique cookie was exposed to your ad over a given time period. Use this metric to better understand if your ad is engaging users effectively.

Example: If your ad’s average impression frequency per cookie is 1.49, it means that a cookie was exposed to your ad about one and a half times during a specific period, on average.

More on Frequency and Reach (Adwords Help): https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472714?hl=en

Below are the results comparing two Google display network (GDN) campaigns to two remarketing campaigns:

– As you can see the remarketing campaigns delivers ads with a much higher frequency to users than the GDN campaign
– The higher your frequency the more your remarketing ads can be perceived as “annoying”

Step 2: How To Setup Frequency Capping

Click on one of your display/remarketing campaigns -> Settings -> Ad Delivery: Ad Rotation, frequency capping -> Frequency capping -> Edit

– Start by limiting your impressions to half of what your reports are currently showing. Run the campaigns with the new setting for two weeks and compare the performance to the previous setting.
– You can limit impressions per user on a daily, weekly or monthly basis
– You can limit impressions per campaign, ad group or per ad
– If your messaging is similar in all of your ad groups, it makes sense to limit impressions on a campaign basis
– If you are running different ads in each ad group, you can choose to limit impressions per ad group or per ad