Your winning ad has a frequency problem

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Cat Goetze teaches AI online, but spends three to five hours a week offline to protect her creativity.

Her brand, Physical Phones, is a Bluetooth landline designed to help others do the same, and she built the brand with using the same tools she'd been teaching all along.

Cat's advice for founders: "I try to always encourage people not to just use AI for the easy stuff like 'make this email sound better'—really give it the harder, meatier problems."

She does exactly that: using AI to model 2026 personnel spend, structure customer service operating procedures, and troubleshoot production-line bugs.

Read her story—including how the brand hit $1M in sales in less than a year—on Shopify's Substack, In Stock

Meta published this years ago and almost nobody acts on it: after two impressions of an identical creative, probability of purchase declines precipitously.

Not gently. Off a cliff.

Show someone your ad once, there's some chance they buy. Show it twice, the chance holds, sometimes it even goes up, because they're warmer on the second look. Show it a third time and it collapses. Fourth time, near zero.

The catch is that the decay is specific to the same creative. Swap in a novel ad for impression three and probability stays high. Swap in another for impression four, still high. The buyer isn't tired of you. They're tired of that ad.

So frequency isn't a media buying metric. It's a creative supply metric. High frequency means Meta wanted to keep serving that person and you didn't give it anything new to serve.

Here's the two-minute check.

Open Ads Manager. Go to the ad level, not campaign, not ad set. Filter to your cold campaigns only. Set the window to the last 30 or 60 days. Add the Frequency column.

Now read it. In a healthy account, cold ads almost never show a frequency above 2. Blue Sense Digital runs $100M+ a year across 80+ ecommerce brands and says not one of their cold ads sits above 2. It just doesn't happen.

If yours are above 2, that's not a bidding problem or an audience problem. You've run out of creative, and Meta is recycling what you gave it into the same pool of people. Your ROAS is already sliding, you just haven't attributed it to this yet.

The part that catches good accounts. Launching three ads doesn't fix it if all three talk to the same person. Andromeda bundles similar creatives and serves them to the same audience pool, so three variants of one angle behave like one ad at 3x the frequency. Three creatives that speak to three different people reach three different pools, and frequency drops on its own.

Action Summary:

Credit: Blue Sense Digital

A few weeks ago we ran Neil Patel's method for checking whether AI recommends your brand.

Pull 10 of your longer reviews, turn every worry into a question, run them through ChatGPT one at a time, note whether you show up.

It works. It's also an afternoon of copy-paste, and it only tells you where you stood on a Tuesday. Do it once and you have a snapshot. Nobody does it twice.

Semrush One runs that check continuously, sitting next to the organic data you already watch. The Domain Research panel toggles between SEO and AI Search, so authority score, traffic share, keyword movement, and whether you're surfacing in AI answers all live in one view instead of a browser tab and a notebook.

The SEO game is changing. Stay ahead and stay visible.

DTC Daily readers get 14 days of Semrush One free. Unlimited access to every tool in the suite.

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