Most ad platforms should have frequency capping. Some marketers forget to set f-caps. Sometimes their media agency forgets to set it up, or misconfigured the set up. If advertisers are buying programmatic ads for the tonnage, they won’t care or won’t know. But, obviously consumers are already annoyed at ads; and they are likely going to be even more annoyed when they see the same ad dozens of times over time, or multiple times on the same page, like the example below. Four of the same ads on the page won’t increase your chances of getting them to buy something from you. In fact, it’s actually artificially depressing your click-throughs — the human user can only click on one ad (your denominator is 4X higher than it should be).
Use FouAnalytics to check that frequency caps are set. Even if they are set, sometimes they don’t work very well. In the example below from my experimental campaign, I set a daily f-cap of 1 and a lifetime f-cap of 1. Note the counts in the fingerprint data grid. Each fingerprint represents a unique device-browser combo. Clearly frequency caps were not working well — e.g. 49 ads shown to the same user.
Look at this outrageous frequency example.
Frequency caps can be set at the DSP level and it can also be set on the ad server. We run our own ad server - Revive. See below for examples of settings you can use to limit the problem of multiple of the same ad showing up on the same page.
Be sure to check for frequency capping using FouAnalytics. Do you think the following example was deliberate? Five ads from the same advertiser on the same page; or they didn’t know this was happening and eating up a lot of their impressions?