A frequency cap limits how often one person sees your advertisement. For a local contractor the setting matters more than it does for a national brand, because your audience is small enough that without a cap the same few dozen households absorb the entire budget.
Frequency is not really a setting
Worth understanding before touching the control: frequency is budget divided by audience. The cap is a ceiling on an outcome, not a dial that produces one.
That has a consequence people find surprising. If your audience is small and your budget is not, capping frequency does not spread the ads over more people; there are no more people. It simply leaves the budget unspent. The cap has told you something about your audience rather than solved anything, which is a problem worth checking before you tune anything.
Reasonable starting points
There is no universally correct number, and anyone quoting one without asking about your audience or your sales cycle is guessing. As starting positions that can be adjusted from evidence:
- A handful of impressions per person per week is a common opening position for retargeting a local service, rather than a per-day figure. Daily caps sound restrained and still add up to a great many exposures over a fortnight.
- Think in totals across the whole window. Three a day for thirty days is ninety impressions to one household. Nobody sets out to do that, and it happens constantly.
- Lower it for anything sensitive or expensive. Ninety reminders about a roof replacement is not persuasion.
The window matters more than the cap
How long somebody remains in the audience does more damage than how often they see the ad on any given day.
Match it to the decision. Emergency work is decided within hours, so a long window reaches people whose problem is solved. Repairs and maintenance run days. Replacements and large projects genuinely take weeks, and are the case where a longer window is justified.
A default thirty-day window applied to every audience is the most common misconfiguration in contractor retargeting, and it is the one that produces complaints.
Exclude the people who already called
The cheapest improvement available, and frequently absent. Someone who booked should leave the audience immediately.
Continuing to advertise to an existing customer wastes the budget on a conversion you already have and reads badly, a household that had you out on Tuesday and is still being chased on Friday concludes you are not paying attention.
This is harder for phone-driven businesses, because the platform cannot see a call. If most of your conversions arrive by telephone, exclusions have to be maintained another way, often by uploading a customer list periodically. It is manual and it is worth doing.
What to watch instead of the cap
Read the average frequency your campaign is actually achieving rather than the ceiling you set. The two are different numbers, and the achieved figure tells you whether the cap is doing anything.
If frequency climbs while results flatten, the audience is exhausted. The answer is more traffic, a wider audience or less budget: not a fresh set of images, which changes what a saturated audience sees without changing how often.
Frequently asked questions
What frequency cap should I set for retargeting?
Start with a small number of impressions per person per week rather than per day, and adjust from what you observe. Any specific figure offered without reference to your audience size and sales cycle is a guess.
Should I cap per day or per week?
Per week, and check the total across the whole membership window. Three a day for a month is ninety impressions to one household.
Why is my frequency high even with a cap?
The audience is too small for the budget. The cap cannot create more people to show ads to.
How do I stop advertising to customers who already booked?
Exclude converters from the audience. For phone-driven trades the platform cannot see the call, so this usually means uploading a customer list periodically: manual, and worth it.
Where to start
Check two numbers: your membership window and your achieved average frequency. If the window is thirty days by default and the frequency is climbing while bookings are not, you have found the setting that is costing you money and goodwill together.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our pay-per-click management or book a strategy call.
