• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 3, 2022

Search and performance marketers looking across screens to connected television now have a way to control their ad frequency on connected TV (CTV).

Google’s CTV frequency management feature in Display & Video 360 now allows marketers to control the number of times people see their ads across YouTube and other CTV apps.

Chris Moreno, vice president of media at NP Digital, in an email told Search & Performance Marketing Daily that the performance agency has clients running search, CTV and YouTube ads.

“Our CTV ads purchased via DV360 currently allow us to monitor and control the frequency, but only from one platform or streaming app at a time,” he wrote. “This new ability from Google will be very helpful, allowing us to monitor and prevent ad fatigue, making sure the audience doesn't get overwhelmed by the same ad as they bounce across steaming apps.”

He wrote that setting daily frequency caps will guarantee the audience will only see our ads a certain number of times per day, as they move across apps or CTV devices, preventing wasted budget and ad fatigue.”

Ed Papazian, president of Media Dynamics, said the feature isn’t without challenges, but called it a “mechanical option,” a “nice interesting refinement,” but it caps the number of impressions without taking into consideration if the ad was viewed.

“The problem advertisers have with all these scheduling ideas is, how do you determine the number of times a person really sees the ad vs. the number of times the ad serves up?,” he said. “If I think the best way is to serve the ad four times per month, you might not get four. You may need to serve the ad 12 times to get the consumer to see the ad four times. It looks and sounds great until you get down to implementing it. Surveys show a huge percentage of viewers don’t look at the ad.”

For display or video ads, frequency capping -- which limits the number of video or display ads that appear to the same person -- relies on third-party cookies as by default, per Google, but when those are not available first-party cookies are used to approximate impressions.

Google estimates the platform for the latest feature covers 92% of ad-supported CTV households. 

Capping impressions is helpful, since TV consumption is not a pull channel, but rather a push.

Shane Ragiel, senior director of digital strategy at Chacka, said the goal is to appear enough times to keep the brands top of mind, but not be intrusive or annoying.

“When it comes to channels like connected TV, social media, and display, advertisers should understand that this is a push channel, but not to be too pushy,” Ragiel said. “These channels will happily spend and reach as many users as many times as possible. This will help marketers identify the point of diminishing return and deliver efficient ad buys across several touchpoint.”

Merkle helps several brands with CTV campaigns.

Trevor Hadick, director of media strategy, analytics and activation at Merkle, said CTV pushes the brand’s message to the consumer, but there should be a balance as to the number of times a consumer should see an advertisement and how many different creatives and unit lengths a brand has running at a single time.

If a brand wants to educate a consumer about the launch of a new product or service, the advertiser will cap the number of impressions weekly to ensure it remains top of mind.

“However, we would want allow the user to search and see our search engine marketing ads as many times as possible, with the hopes that it gets them in the conversion and lead generation funnel,” Hadick explains in an email to Inside Performance.

Most CTV inventory does not have a click function, which means the user must use a different device to visit the brand’s app, website or contact them via a phone call.

“Google doesn’t natively allow for ‘impression capping’ in search ads, but some clients may choose to use remarketing lists for search ads or Google Analytics audiences to control suppression or even greater visibility for users who have previously searched and clicked on ads,” he explains.

Search advertisers, of course, don't pay for the ad until someone clicks on it. When it comes to ad impressions, Google manages the user-by-user behavior directly for brands. This means that if a user searches many times without clicking on an advertiser’s ad, Google may choose to selectively remove that advertiser from the auction due to relevancy or lack thereof for that user.