Frequency Caps on LinkedIn Ads and How to Break Them
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Should you bid CPC or CPM?
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Show Transcript
Today, you're going to learn way more about frequency caps on LinkedIn Ads than you ever thought you wanted to know. We're talking about frequency on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, there's a lot of confusion around the frequency caps on LinkedIn. If you talk to your LinkedIn rep, they'll tell you, but it's not published anywhere in the LinkedIn Help section, at least that I've found. Plus, many of you advertisers won't have a dedicated rep. So I wanted to create a resource where we could clear up some of the questions about it, and make sure you stick around to the end, because I'm going to be sharing a hack that you can use to break the LinkedIn frequency caps, you won't want to miss that. In the news, make sure you're subscribed to our YouTube channel, because we published this week, a video walkthrough all about whether you should bid by cost per click or cost per impression. And we showed all of the math behind it. So if you're a total math nerd, or really want to understand LinkedIn's auction, you won't want to miss that it's about a 10 minute video. I want to thank those of you who have been leaving reviews on the show. A huge thank you because as you know, reviews are a huge part about what gets the show picked up and shared and featured a shout out to "Mad" Matt N. Who said, "Highly recommended if you're advertising on LinkedIn. AJ drops tons of knowledge in every episode, I was very fortunate to discover his show before I actually started advertising on LinkedIn. He really helped set expectations regarding what to expect from a management standpoint, and saved me countless hours of banging my head against the wall asking questions like, Why doesn't the platform do insert missing feature we take for granted after advertising on Facebook. Because of his show, I was able to set up my tracking properly out of the gate and have a very low stress launch with no surprises." Matt, that makes me extremely happy to hear that you found out about the show before you started advertising and that we were able to help you iron out some of the kinks before they even got introduced to your accounts. So great work on your part. We also had sweet.tvb. And she mentioned, "Great resource for marketers. I've been running LinkedIn Ads for the past three years and this show gives a wealth of in depth information to push performance further. Love the helpful insight presented." Thanks so much sweet. And for everyone else out there, make sure you leave a review. I'd love to shout you out. So let's go ahead and jump into frequency. Let's hit it.
First, I think we need to understand what frequency actually is. Frequency is basically the number of times that an ad is served to an entity of some kind. It's measured as the total number of impressions divided by the unique people who saw those ads. The unique users or unique visitors, those are called reach as well. So if your ad gets 10 impressions, but it was only served to five unique people, that means the, on average, each member of your audience saw that ad two times. And of course, it's not total science, it's totally possible that one of those five people saw your ad three times, while another one of them only saw it once. It is after all an average. And frequency can be measured by the individual ad, meaning how many times has that audience member seen this one ad, or you can measure at the campaign level, how many times each audience member has been exposed to any of the ads in this campaign. You can view your frequency numbers inside of campaign manager. You first go to columns that are right above your list of campaigns, and select the drop down called Delivery. That's going to show you your frequency and reach and all of the numbers that deal with that. If you remember, LinkedIn kind of took these numbers away or averaged them together for a certain amount of time. It appears that this has been reverted, but I think in the future, we can expect some of these numbers to be a little bit obscured for privacy reasons, which I do not get. But hey, make hay while the sun shines. So that's frequency. But then let's talk about frequency caps. The lack of frequency caps is what makes live TV so annoying. Because TV advertisers don't get feedback on which households have seen which ad, they have to make sure that everyone in that audience has been exposed to their ad a certain number of times. So they showed over multiple ad breaks of the same show. And then you find yourself hating a brand...