Enter your budget, CPM, and target frequency to instantly see total impressions, unique reach, what percentage of your audience you'll cover, and your cost per person reached.
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Reach = Impressions ÷ Frequency, capped at your audience size. All figures are estimates for planning purposes.
Est. Clicks
1,800
Audience Covered
30.0%
Effective Freq.
4.0×
Reach is modeled as impressions ÷ frequency, capped at your audience size — a planning estimate, not a guarantee.
Real platforms de-duplicate reach differently and apply frequency caps that vary by channel.
An effective frequency of 3–7 is ideal for most awareness goals.
Three metrics that define every awareness campaign — and how they relate.
Every single time your ad renders on a screen — including multiple views by the same person. Bought via CPM.
The count of unique individuals who saw your ad at least once. This is the audience you actually touched.
The average number of times each reached person saw your ad. Frequency = Impressions ÷ Reach.
The 3–7 exposure window where memory and response peak. Too few and it fades; too many and it fatigues.
Reach as a percentage of your total addressable market. 30–50% coverage at frequency 3+ drives brand lift.
Budget ÷ unique reach — the true price of getting your message in front of one new person.
Reach is what you buy; frequency is what determines whether it worked.
Reach and frequency are two halves of the same budget. For any fixed spend, buying more reach means lower frequency, and buying more frequency means narrower reach. Deciding the split deliberately is one of the few genuinely strategic choices in media planning — and it is usually made by accident.
The research consensus is that a message needs several exposures to be remembered, but that returns fall away quickly after that. The practical implication is that very high frequency against a small audience is almost always a worse use of money than moderate frequency against a larger one.
| Frequency (per week) | Typical effect | Planning implication |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Largely forgotten | Below the threshold for recall in most categories. |
| 2 – 3 | Effective range | Enough for recognition without irritation. The usual target. |
| 4 – 6 | Diminishing returns | Response per impression falls; still useful in short campaigns. |
| 7 – 10 | Wasteful | Little incremental effect. Money is better spent widening reach. |
| Above 10 | Actively harmful | Drives irritation and negative brand sentiment. |
Short, intense bursts justify higher frequency than always-on campaigns. A one-week promotion at frequency 6 is defensible; the same frequency sustained for three months is not.
You cannot reach more unique people than exist in the targeting. Once you approach saturation, additional budget only buys frequency, whether you intended it or not.
What matters is people reached at or above the effective frequency, not total unique reach. A campaign reaching many people once has achieved very little.
Tight targeting raises CPM and shrinks the pool, so the same budget produces much higher frequency. Both effects push the same direction.
Most platforms will not manage frequency for you on reach objectives. An explicit cap is the only reliable control.
Several executions of one idea sustain higher total frequency than a single ad shown repeatedly, because the wear-out is per-execution.
For businesses with steady demand, moderate continuous presence usually outperforms occasional heavy bursts that go dark between them.
Reach targets set in isolation routinely imply frequencies of fifteen or more. Always divide impressions by reach before committing.
A hundred thousand impressions might be twenty thousand people five times over. Reporting the former as audience size overstates it fivefold.
A large budget against a small audience is the single most reliable way to generate complaints about your own advertising.
The same people see you on several channels. Summing per-platform reach double-counts and inflates apparent coverage substantially.
The useful discipline is to run this calculation before booking, not after reporting. If the plan implies a frequency above about four a week, you have three options: widen the audience, extend the flight, or reduce the budget. Doing none of them means paying to show the same people the same ad until they resent it.
We plan reach-and-frequency campaigns across Meta, YouTube, display, and programmatic for businesses across Canada.