By rob eagar 
It is all about knowing the art of being ‘just right’ and setting the right frequency of your ad in the programmatic advertising platforms. ‘Not too few, not too many’, frequency capping in programmatic puts an end to the issues surrounding balancing reach and frequency in advertising. Ad exposure management is vital in deciding if your ad campaign creates the impact that it desires, or if it violates the capping restrictions thereby overexposing the ad leading to limited reach and ad fatigue.
According to mFilterIt reports, on average across the industry, 30% of the impressions served exceeds the capping norms set by the advertiser in the ad manager. It is important to identify channels that violate the ad frequency cap set by the advertiser or the agency and block the ad from being served beyond the set F-cap limit. An automated process powered with AI-ML tech can monitor and stop F-cap violations, maintaining the sanctity of your ad campaign, stopping ad budget wastage and boosting ROI.
Wondering how it works? Why is it needed? Let’s explore how it can help optimize your ad campaigns and prevent wastage of ad spend.
What is Frequency Capping Violation?
Frequency capping is when a brand sets a limit on the number of times its advertisement is displayed to a given user within a specific time frame. Breaching this leads to oversaturation, which means the ads are shown to the same users instead of reaching a broader audience. This not only wastes ad spending but also lowers the reach of the ads and the campaign’s overall efficacy, which is in violation of the objective of the branding campaign.
The goal is to optimize the reach for a branding campaign and ensure that ad achieves desired engagement. However, when the F-Cap is breached it leads to ad overexposure to a target audience resulting in wastage of ad spending. This in turn skews up the ad performance.
Such issues are particularly common in programmatic advertising, where the complexities of real-time bidding (RTB) and ad delivery can lead to unintended frequency breaches.
How does Frequency Cap monitoring works for a branding campaign?
Optimal use of ad budgets in OTT advertising is very important as OTT advertising competes aggressively. Whenever a user accesses an OTT platform, the publisher serves the user-targeted ads based on campaign goals.
However, maintaining F-cap compliance to avoid over-frequency impressions that cause ad fatigue, or the same user being shown the same ad or campaign too many times, is essential. Therefore, the creative serving hub in F-Cap violation detection comes into play, where it carries out a real-time check on F-caps before delivering any such ad.
In case a violation is identified on a device, the creative is not approved for placement preventing the f-cap breach. That means every impression counts towards reaching campaign objectives and is compliant with advertiser guidelines.
Need of Real-time Analysis for Preventing Ad Overexposure
Don’t Bombard, Leave a Balance! Frequency Capping places the number of times the same advertisement is displayed to an individual within a certain period within a certain limit.
- Optimized Ad Spends – Is it the same consumer who is viewing your ad more than once in the same day? While one might argue why it’s important to see ads more than once, the fact of the matter is there is overexposure of the advertisements in this case along with always increasing ad fatigue.
- Improved ROI – F-Cap violations make ad campaigns ineffective by serving the same ad to a certain targeted audience. When this is brought under check, budgets are more actively used in optimized traffic sources, improving impacts on campaign ROI.
- Prevent Negative Brand Impact – People can regard the brand as pushy or needy which reflects negatively towards the brand as then a negative perception can set in leading to a version of that very brand.
- Reaching out to Maximum Audience – Hitting this sweet spot more than three times not only discourages the viewer in further clicking the advertisement or undertaking the subsequent required action (conversion) which are the very objectives of the campaign but further harms ‘Click Through Rates’ (CTR) & ‘Conversion’ levels as well.
Advantages of F-cap Monitoring
- Weeding Out Inefficiency – By validating online ad traffic for measuring audience exposure limits to improve efficiencies on marketing spends.
- Better-Quality Decision Making – By validating online ad traffic to clean up data for making better business decisions using AI & ML algorithms.
- Optimizations & Insights – It improves trust by creating transparency in the campaign
- Optimizing Publishers Ecosystem – By prioritizing the best traffic source and segregating them from bad ones. It also improves engagement and campaign performance.
- Ensuring Brand Safety – By protecting the brand image and value from irrelevant media placements by ensuring digital campaigns run with globally recognized brand guidelines (GARM).
Conclusion
Monitoring frequency caps is a strategic necessity in ensuring the success of modern advertising campaigns. It allows for the proper balancing of ad exposure and reach, thereby heightening the overall impact of the campaign, preventing the effects of ad fatigue, and protecting a brand’s reputation.
AI and ML-based real-time monitoring plays a key role in detecting and preventing F-cap violations. This technology ensures that every ad impression creates value. For example, it helps optimize ad budget, improves the return on investment, and increases transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem.
In the increasingly competitive programmatic ad fraud solution and OTT advertising space, where engagement with the audience matters significantly, frequency cap monitoring enables brands to maintain that intricate balance between ‘not too few, not too many.’ Through these tools and practices, advertisers can improve the overall effectiveness of their campaigns, foster deeper associations with their audiences, and build long-term, impactful advertising strategies.