Use Frequency Caps to Avoid Diminishing Returns

This post was most recently updated on September 24th, 2019

Individual ads are much less valuable when displayed to a site’s visitor for the second, third, or even greater time. This makes sense, of course; ads are much less likely to be effective the more a user sees them (a phenomenon we’ve discussed elsewhere).

One way to increase the diversity of your ads, though not guaranteed to work, is to simply make sure you have a diverse assortment of ad networks competing with each other within each ad unit. Since the CPMs for ads fall the more often a visitor sees the ad units, the low-paying instances will just be outbid by the ads from other units.

But if you want to be guaranteed not to display an ad to the same visitor more than a certain number of times, turn on a frequency cap. You can find this in Doubleclick for Publishers under Orders >> Settings >> Adjust delivery.

You can set a maximum number of impressions per visitor, and you can also set how often the cap will be reset. For example, if you set a frequency cap of 20 that will be reset every week, then a visitor won’t see an ad more than 20 times in a week.

There’s no magic number, though. We can’t just tell you how to set a frequency cap because it depends on many different variables. But here’s what we do recommend: experimenting. Play around with frequency caps and time periods in which they’ll be reset. See how your revenue grows.

We’d love to help you increase your revenue by 50-100%. Contact us at MonetizeMore to learn more about how we can optimize your site’s revenue.

Kean Graham

Kean Graham is the CEO and founder of MonetizeMore & a pioneer in the Adtech Industry. He is the resident expert in Ad Optimization, covering areas like Adsense Optimization,GAM Management, and third-party ad network partnerships. Kean believes in the supremacy of direct publisher deals and holistic optimization as keys to effective and consistent ad revenue increases.