Glossary · reach-and-delivery
What is Frequency?
Frequency is impressions divided by reach: the average number of times each person saw your ad during the date range you are looking at. It is a diagnostic, not a goal. A frequency of 1.5 to 3 over a month is comfortable for a local audience, and the first two or three exposures usually do useful work, since almost nobody acts on a first sighting. What matters is the shape of the trend. Frequency rising while clicks fall means you have run out of new people to reach, and every additional impression is being spent on someone who has already decided.
What does Frequency mean for a business in Pakistan?
Frequency climbs alarmingly fast in the twin cities because the audiences are small. A 7 km circle drawn around F-10 or Saddar contains a few hundred thousand eligible accounts at best, so even a modest daily budget cycles through them within a fortnight. Check this weekly, not monthly — by the time a month has passed you have already paid for the damage.
A worked example
A Faizabad phone-repair shop spends PKR 15,000 over 14 days inside a 5 km radius: 38,000 impressions across 8,900 people, a frequency of 4.3. Clicks in days 1 to 5: 210. Clicks in days 10 to 14: 44. Same money, same ad, an audience that has now seen it enough.
Terms that go with this one
These come up in the same conversations and are worth reading together.
- Ad fatiguead fatigueAd fatigue is what happens after an audience has seen your ad often enough to stop responding to it. The symptoms arrive in a familiar order:…
- Paid reachpaid reachPaid reach is the number of accounts that saw your content because money was spent to place it in front of them. You choose the group — an age band,…
- CPMCPMCPM means cost per thousand impressions — what you pay to have your ad appear a thousand times. Impressions are not people: one person scrolling past…
- Negative feedbacknegative feedbackNegative feedback is every action people take to make your content go away: hiding the post, hiding everything from your page, marking it as spam,…
- CreativecreativeThe creative is the thing a person actually sees and hears — the video or image, the first frame, the words burned on screen, the voice-over, the…
Frequency — quick answers
What does Frequency mean?
Frequency is impressions divided by reach: the average number of times each person saw your ad during the date range you are looking at. It is a diagnostic, not a goal.
Frequency ko Urdu mein kya kehte hain?
فریکوئنسی — though in practice almost everyone in Pakistan says "frequency". Frequency climbs alarmingly fast in the twin cities because the audiences are small.
Why does Frequency matter for a business in Pakistan?
Frequency climbs alarmingly fast in the twin cities because the audiences are small. A 7 km circle drawn around F-10 or Saddar contains a few hundred thousand eligible accounts at best, so even a modest daily budget cycles through them within a fortnight. Check this weekly, not monthly — by the time a month has passed you have already paid for the damage.
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