What is Frequency Capping?

Frequency capping is the restriction applied by AMS regarding the maximum number of times a unique user will be served a particular ad.

In AMS, the frequency capping is applied in an interval of a day. This means that if a user will see your ad 3 times in an interval of 20 hours, then he can only get 2 more impressions of the same ad in the next 4 hours. You’ve guessed it right, the frequency capping applied on AMS campaigns is 5x per user/per day. This is applied automatically to every AMS campaign and it is not something that you can change via the AMS platform (not yet anyway).

How does Frequency Capping work in AMS campaigns?

Amazon uses both cookies and the users’ log in details to determine when to apply these caps to the campaigns. Also, a person is considered a different user on any device or browser that he/she uses.

1. If a user is logged in on Amazon, there are separate caps applied for desktop, mobile web and for the Amazon mobile app. This means that a user can get up to 5 impressions of the same ad in an interval of a day on a desktop, while he can also get the same amount of impressions separately on the mobile app, or if he uses mobile to access the Amazon site.
2. Amazon is is also using cookies to determine when to apply the frequency capping. Just as with mobile vs desktop, each browser will be tracked separately, meaning that a user can get up to 5 impressions of the same ad on a day when he uses IE, and, on the same day, can also get the same amount of impressions if he accesses Amazon via a different web-browser (e.g. Chrome).

Important to know about Frequency capping in AMS

• If a user clears his cache, the cap will be bypassed.
• The frequency capping applies to your ad, not to the keywords that you have in the campaign. For example, if a user is searching for your product using the same search term 5 times, and he is given the same ad as an impression, he will not get the impression again on that particular day even if he changes the search term.
• The frequency capping doesn’t apply to Sponsored Products campaigns. It only applies to Headline Search and Product Display Ads.

Why is frequency capping important?

When it comes to displaying ads to potential customers in order to convert them into your clients, you need to make sure that they are seeing your ad and that they consciously realise what your service is. Because of the amount of advertisments that a person is being offered nowadays, we are looking at a phenomenon called ad blindness. Basically, this means that we don’t see the majority of the ads on a page. Therefore, a user needs to be served more than a single impression in order for him/her to remember your ad. Otherwise, he might be served the ad, but he wouldn’t see it.

The 5x cap on AMS could be considered a good number of impressions served to a user. It is not too low and it is not too high either, so you make sure that your ad is indeed seen by your target audience.

When checking to see if your ads appear on site, make sure that you take into account the frequency capping. You might wonder why you cannot see your ad – this might be because you’ve already been served the ad 5 times on that particular day.  If that’s not the reason, make sure of the following:

• you are targeting those search terms;
• you have enough budget in the campaign;
• you are bidding enough to win the bid-auction.

How to bypass the frequency capping and serve more impressions to users on Amazon?

Momentarily, there’s no feature in AMS that allows us to control the frequency cap. Also, the Amazon Account Managers are not able to change this from their side either (only the development team would be able to do it, but.. to simply put it… they don’t want to).

If you truly wish to serve more impressions to a user, the solution is to duplicate your AMS campaigns. Each campaign is measured separately on AMS, so even if you are running duplicated ones, they will still be considered and measured individually. This means that,the more campaigns you will have, the more impressions you should get – if the above conditions are met and if there’s enough search volume on the key-terms that you are bidding for.