Fatigue Is a Cohort Problem
Account-level reporting shows frequency as an averaged value. Cohort reporting shows frequency per audience stack. At that resolution you see that a specific audience is long exhausted while the account average still looks fine.
Platform Differences
TikTok audiences fatigue faster because feed velocity is higher. A frequency cap of 2.2 in 7 days makes sense. Meta allows 2.8. Snapchat users see ads less often; the cap can sit at 3.2. Platform-specific thresholds are essential.
Running a blanket 3.0 cap across all platforms burns 18 to 32% of spend on TikTok. Platform differentiation is not an optimization detail; it is margin protection.
Fatigue Recovery
Once fatigue has set in, more spend is not the answer. Audience expansion (new lookalikes, cold broad) is the only clean solution, paired with hook replacement using the next 4 to 6 variations from the pipeline.
„Fatigue is not laziness. Fatigue is scaling mathematics.”