What frequency measures
Frequency is impressions divided by reach. Impressions count how many times an ad was shown; reach counts how many distinct people it was shown to. Divide one by the other and you get the average number of times each of those people saw it. Nothing more complicated than that is going on.
The catch is that the answer depends entirely on the date range you have selected. Frequency over a quarter blends a launch week with a quiet month and tells you almost nothing about either. It also depends on the level you read it at: an ad set can look restrained while a person sitting in three overlapping ad sets sees the brand far more often than any single row suggests.
Why frequency matters
Repetition is how an unfamiliar name becomes a familiar one. Almost nobody buys from a business the first time they notice it, so a campaign that reaches everyone once and stops has usually wasted the reach it paid for. Some repetition is the point.
Past a certain point, though, repetition turns into irritation. People hide the ad, report it or simply stop registering it, and the auction responds by charging more to keep showing something that is being avoided. Frequency is the earliest visible warning of that turn. In a market the size of Nepal, where a well-defined audience may run to a few hundred thousand people rather than tens of millions, that ceiling arrives sooner than advertisers used to larger markets expect.
Where frequency goes wrong
The main error is reading it alone. High frequency is not automatically a fault — a short retargeting push aimed at people who already know you is meant to be repetitive, and a fortnight of it can be the most profitable spend in the account. Judged next to cost per result, click-through rate and negative feedback, the same number tells a clear story; judged on its own it tells you nothing.
The second error is structural. Narrow audiences left running for months with the same creative will always climb, and so will accounts that have quietly built several ad sets targeting overlapping groups of people. Fixing the creative when the real problem is overlap wastes a production cycle.
What to do about it
Watch the trend rather than the value. Frequency rising while click-through rate falls and cost per result climbs is creative fatigue, and the fix is new creative or a wider audience, not a bid change. Frequency rising while results hold steady is usually fine, and worth leaving alone.
Where the audience is the reason the campaign works, rotate the creative instead of loosening the targeting. Use a frequency cap only on reach and awareness objectives, where the control exists and does what it says. And before rebuilding anything, check audience overlap, so you are solving the problem you actually have rather than the one the report first suggested.