Awareness and B2B buying
What is frequency in advertising?
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what it means here
Here is what the term means for a UK buyer
The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different.
In an AdBuyMCP awareness plan, you choose the frequency: 3, 5 or 12 times a week, and each step up costs more. Frequency is planned: each week we buy enough ads aimed at your market for it to see you that many times on average. Some of every channel's audience sits outside your market, and the weekly report shows what each channel delivered against the plan. Each channel reports what it delivered in its own unit, and no UK service de-duplicates frequency across sellers, so a plan states frequency the way media plans have long stated opportunities to see.
How often should a B2B market see your ads?
The right number depends on what the plan is for. AdBuyMCP's three frequencies describe three jobs. 3 times a week is good for staying in view between your market's buying cycles. 5 times a week is good for a market you are actively trying to win this year. 12 times a week is good for a launch or a raise, when you want your market to see you most often.
The price follows from the frequency and the size of your market, at one published rate: £100 a month for every 1,000 people in your market, for each time a week. A plan is priced on a market of at least 10,000 people, so all four channels get enough to run, and the smallest plan, 3 times a week, starts at £3,000 a month before VAT.
Why is a plan's frequency planned rather than counted?
Nobody can prove that a named person walked past a billboard, and every channel's audience includes people outside your market, which is why the definition above is an average aimed at a market rather than a count of people.
Each channel then reports in its own unit: proof of play and a modelled audience for out-of-home screens, impressions and completed views by household for streaming TV, downloads and ad deliveries for podcasts, and impressions and clicks for ChatGPT ads, where OpenAI reports no reach or frequency at all. Read the weekly report as delivery against the plan.
Sources: Route, Audience measurement, checked 20 October 2026; OpenAI Ads developer documentation, Reporting, checked 20 October 2026.
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related terms
These terms sit next to this one
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Reach
The number of distinct people or households exposed to a campaign at least once, as opposed to the total number of impressions delivered. Usually expressed as a count or as a percentage of a defined universe.
Frequency capping
Limiting how many times one person or household sees the same advert within a given period, to control wear-out and wasted impressions. It is set per campaign, per channel or, rarely, across channels, and that granularity is what decides whether the cap means anything.
In-market and out-of-market buyers
In-market buyers are the businesses actively looking to buy in a category right now; out-of-market buyers will buy in that category at some point but are not looking yet. In B2B the out-of-market group is usually far larger, because companies replace most suppliers only every few years.
Share of voice
A brand's advertising presence expressed as a proportion of all advertising in its category, in a given market and period. Used as a planning benchmark on the argument that share of voice above share of market tends to precede growth.
same group
These terms are also in Awareness and B2B buying
How B2B buyers choose vendors, and the words for planning how often your market sees you and how big that market is.