Campaign level Impression frequency 1 per month, yet Avg. Freq 4.9 [ Edited ]

[#1]

Hello,

I think Video Ads statistics are in some form of beta testing or it makes some miscalculations because : 

1) I have setup campaigns now with a frequency capping of 1 impression per user per month, videos advertised in the current month, march, no overlapping with february.

2) The result on the column "avg . impressions frequency " is 4.9 and for views is 5 .....

3) The campaign has 1 target and 1 Ad, there cannot be overlapping of users due to overlapping targets of multiple Ads.

Did anyone experience this anomalie ?

[edit] Later update : I have isolated the problem to the data reported on the 9 of March where the interface tells me that I had 9 unique users for 486 views , and each one has viewed (over 20 seconds) the ad for ..... 54 times ... EACH user ?? This is crazy, remember I have set a frequency capping for impressions for 1 per user per month.

[#2]

Allright, so it must be an odd problem in my account, I have contacted google by chat ( for the 3rd time in my life ) and they will offer assistance. 

I will update the topic with their response if it is usefull for others to read.

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Hi Adrian B,

I am happy to provide some insight here in regards to the reporting of the avg. frequency and overall reporting for your AdWords for video campaign. It appears that you are encountering normal data delays in the AdWords for Video reporting section. AdWords for Video data is not real-time and it generally takes approximately 3-24 hours for the data to fully appear in the account. Please clear your cache and cookies, refresh the browser and ensure you are looking at the most recent data. When you look at the data you may not see that the frequency is capped at exactly 1 for the average view frequency metric and there can be several reasons for this. 

The frequency capping feature may show a 1-5% different in average view frequency due to serving latency, users issuing multiple requests at once, if someone deletes cookies we would show them another ad as if they were a unique person, and ultimately it is looking at views rather than impressions. I hope this helps clarify your issue and feel free to reach out with anything else!

Best,

Craig B. 

[#4]

Wow , thanks ! Now the data for 9 of march looks as it should, 480 unique viewers with a frequency of 1. Since today is 12 March I suppose I am seeing a delay of 3-4 days for updating complete data for unique viewers. I don't mind having small differences like you mentioned, 5% is acceptable.

From now on I will set the time filter to ignore the most recent 4 days.

Thank you very much for explaining the weird looking situation. I am now confident to launch a larger budget video campaign.