Amazon DSP Frequency Cap: How to Set It in 2026
Archit Arora
TL;DR
Key takeaways
An Amazon DSP frequency cap limits how many impressions one user or household sees in a set window, at ad group, campaign or frequency group level.
In 2026 one cap counts impressions across publishers, and reach and frequency can be de-duplicated across campaigns, accounts and sponsored ads.
We start prospecting at about 3 impressions a week and remarketing at 3 to 5, then tune from the frequency distribution.
Impressions above the cap are measurable waste: excess impressions times CPM is the budget you can move to new shoppers.
An Amazon DSP frequency cap is the most impressions one person or household can see from an ad group, campaign or group of campaigns in a window you choose, such as 3 per 7 days. You set it in the delivery settings of a Display, Video and Audio (DVA) campaign.
This guide covers how caps work in Amazon Ads Agent in late October 2026: the four levels, user versus household, how caps differ by format, the caps we start from and how to find the right one from your own data, with the arithmetic.
What Is an Amazon DSP Frequency Cap?
A frequency cap is a limit on impressions per user or household per time unit. Amazon's frequency glossary allows 1 to 500 impressions over a window of up to 60 days, and the setup page lets you count it in days, hours or minutes.
The cap matters because DSP is bought on impressions. With a fixed budget and CPM, frequency decides whether you buy many people a few times or a few people many times.
Since 2026 the terms have changed too. Orders are now campaigns, line items are now ad groups, and creatives are now ads, because DSP campaigns became Display, Video and Audio campaigns inside Amazon Ads Agent on September 29, 2026.
What Changed in Amazon DSP Frequency Management in 2025 and 2026
Frequency caps themselves work as they did. What changed is how far one cap reaches, and how precisely you can measure frequency across everything you buy on Amazon.
1. Reach and Frequency Became De-Duplicated
At unBoxed in November 2025, Amazon launched dynamic reach and frequency reporting for custom periods over the past 15 months. In February 2026 it added cross-campaign breakdowns by account, supply source and frequency group, plus a "Reach and frequency" report template.
On April 2, 2026, Amazon added cross-account reporting and frequency group reporting at manager-account level. You can now see true unique reach across DSP and Sponsored Ads together. Our DSP reports guide shows how to build that report.
One distinction matters here. That de-duplication is measurement. Your DSP caps still control only DSP impressions; Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands have no cap you can set.
2. One Cap Now Counts Across Publishers
Amazon's frequency help page, updated September 28, 2026, describes cross-publisher capping. A cap of 5 per week on a campaign that buys Prime Video, Netflix and Fire TV uses one counter for all three, and it switches on automatically.
Enforcement depends on the deal. Private auctions and preferred deals are fully capped. Programmatic guaranteed impressions count toward the cap but can't be suppressed on the guaranteed line, so the cap is enforced on your other lines instead.
3. Frequency Groups Reach Across Accounts
Frequency groups launched in 2023 to cap one person across several campaigns. Amazon's Live Events Optimizer launch on December 1, 2025 lists caps at campaign, advertiser account, cross-advertiser and cross-manager account frequency group levels.
4. DVA+ Arrives With AI-Managed Delivery
DVA+, announced September 29, 2026, rolls out in the US from late October. Its quick setup hands targeting, bidding and delivery to Amazon's AI, and Amazon lists frequency caps among the advanced settings. We cover what that means for frequency further down.
The Four Levels of Frequency Control
Amazon lets you control frequency at four levels. Most accounts we audit use one, usually the campaign default, and leave the other three empty.
Level | What it limits | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
Ad group | One tactic: one audience, one format | Different caps for prospecting and remarketing |
Campaign | Every ad group in one campaign | The overall exposure for one flight |
Frequency group | Several campaigns you choose | Brands or tactics that reach the same people |
Advertiser or manager account group | All campaigns in an account, or across accounts | Portfolio caps across brands or a holding company |
1. Ad Group Caps
The ad group (formerly line item) cap is where tactic-level decisions happen. Without one, the ad group is uncapped and only the campaign cap holds it back.
We set a cap on every ad group, because a remarketing pool and a prospecting audience never want the same number.
2. Campaign Caps
The campaign (formerly order) cap limits a person across all its ad groups. Amazon's campaign setup page applies a default if you leave it blank, and warns that combined ad group frequency must never exceed the campaign's.
3. Frequency Groups
A frequency group is one cap across several campaigns. Amazon's frequency group guide suggests adding up the caps of the campaigns inside and setting the group 10% to 20% lower. If the campaigns sum to 10 a day, the group should be no lower than 8.
An advertiser account can sit in at most two advertiser-level frequency groups. Amazon doesn't recommend groups for campaigns with delivery problems or very narrow audiences.
4. Account and Cross-Account Groups
Adding every campaign in an advertiser account, or several accounts, to one group caps a person across a whole brand or portfolio. When Amazon launched frequency groups, it said one packaged goods advertiser found a 34% reach overlap across orders from three brands, and that groups lifted unique reach by 6% on average.
How to Set a Frequency Cap in Amazon Ads Agent
These steps follow Amazon's help pages as of October 2026. Outside the US, the classic order and line item screens use the same fields under the old names.
1. Set the Ad Group Cap
Open Campaigns, then the ad group. In the Delivery card, under Frequency, tick "Limit the number of times a shopper can see this ad", enter the number of impressions, choose days, hours or minutes, then choose user or household and save.
2. Set the Campaign Cap
Open the campaign settings and find the frequency cap under targeting and optimization. Enter a cap at least as high as the combined caps of its ad groups, in the same time unit.
3. Create a Frequency Group
Click Campaigns, then Frequency groups, then New frequency group. Name it, enter the cap and time unit, save, then click Change advertisers/campaigns to add individual campaigns or every campaign under an advertiser.
Only active frequency groups can be added to a campaign. If you build the group first, add it to new campaigns during setup.
User vs Household Frequency
A user cap counts impressions per person, matched through Amazon's signed-in identity. A household cap counts impressions per home, across everyone and every screen in it.
The choice is mostly about the screen. On a living room TV, a household cap is the honest one: three people watching one ad break is one exposure for the household, not three.
Situation | Cap by | Why |
|---|---|---|
Streaming TV, Prime Video, live sports | Household | Shared screen; avoids hammering one home across devices |
Display and online video prospecting | User | Personal devices; the person is the buyer |
Remarketing (views, cart, purchasers) | User | The audience is people who did something |
Audio on shared smart speakers | Household | One speaker, several listeners |
Brand-level portfolio caps | Household | Stops one home seeing every brand you own |
Amazon's October 2024 DSP announcement added household capping inside frequency groups. Amazon said advertisers using these controls saved up to 26% of campaign budgets from duplicate impressions and drove up to 21% incremental reach.
How Frequency Caps Differ by Format
The same number means different things on different formats. A 30-second unskippable spot on a TV is a heavier exposure than a display banner scrolled past on a phone.
Format | Unit we cap by | Our starting cap | Watch |
|---|---|---|---|
Streaming TV | Household | 2 to 3 a week | Household frequency, completion rate, exclusive reach |
Online video | User | About 3 a week (prospecting) | Completion rate, detail page view rate |
Display | User | About 3 a week prospecting, 3 to 5 remarketing | Viewable rate, detail page view rate |
Audio | Household | 2 to 3 a week | Listen-through rate, branded search |
1. Streaming TV
Cap streaming TV at the campaign or frequency group level, so Prime Video, Netflix, Twitch and Fire TV share one counter. Our Prime Video ads guide covers buying the inventory itself.
Watch the exceptions. Programmatic guaranteed deals keep delivering past the cap, Amazon Audience Guaranteed lines don't stop at it, and Twitch share-of-voice lines aren't capped at all.
2. Online Video
Online video runs on personal devices and is usually skippable, so we cap per user. A sequence of two or three different cuts across a week holds attention better than the same cut three times.
3. Display
Display is cheap per impression, which is why it's the format most often over-served. A small remarketing pool on display can reach 20 impressions a person in a week if nothing stops it. Our DSP ad types guide covers the formats in detail.
Amazon also lists Fire tablet and Kindle ads as unsupported by caps and groups, so budget them separately.
4. Audio
Audio is often heard on a shared speaker, so we treat it like streaming TV. Amazon says audio availability in DVA+ expands after launch, in Q4 2026.
Starting Caps by Funnel Stage
Amazon's frequency capping guide says no single cap works for everyone and a blanket cap across all ads isn't recommended. We agree. These are the caps we start from in the accounts we manage, not Amazon's rules.
Stage and audience | Starting cap | Why |
|---|---|---|
Awareness, streaming TV | 2 to 3 a week per household | Reach first; a third spot rarely adds much |
Prospecting display and video | About 3 a week per user | Large pool, so spend on more people |
Product view remarketing, 8 to 30 days | 3 to 5 a week | Stay present through a 6 to 7-day decision |
Cart abandoners, 7 to 14 days | 1 a day | High intent, short window, small pool |
Past purchasers | 2 to 3 a week | Reminder, not pressure |
Brand halo | 2 to 3 a week | Larger pool, lower intent |
These match the caps in our Amazon DSP retargeting guide and our walkthrough of how to create an Amazon DSP campaign, which starts remarketing at 3 to 5 impressions a week.
Two adjustments come up often. For brand lift studies, Amazon's study setup guide says campaigns have historically done best at an average frequency of 4 to 9. For short event flights such as Black Friday week, we loosen remarketing caps for the event days only.
How to Find the Right Frequency Cap From Your Data
A starting cap is a guess. After two to three weeks, your own data tells you where extra impressions stop paying.
1. Read the Frequency Distribution
In unified reporting, add the User frequency (1) to (10+) columns by ad group. The average hides the problem: an average of 3 can mean most people saw one ad and a fifth saw ten or more.
If more than about a fifth of an ad group's audience sits at 10+, the cap is too loose or the audience is too small for the budget.
2. Build a Frequency Response Curve in AMC
The distribution shows who saw how much. A response curve adds what they did. In Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), the Optimal Frequency solution builds it without SQL and recommends a range for a daily cap, and the instructional query "DSP Impression Frequency and Conversions" builds the same table in SQL.
Both group users into frequency buckets and return users, impressions and conversions per bucket. Divide conversions by users and you have a conversion rate by frequency.
3. Work Out the Marginal Cost of Each Extra Impression
The question is never "which bucket converts best?". It's "what does one more impression per person buy?". Here is a worked example for one week of a prospecting ad group that launched without an ad group cap (illustrative numbers, $8 CPM).
Weekly frequency | Users | Impressions | Purchases | Purchase rate | Cost per extra purchase |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 200,000 | 200,000 | 400 | 0.20% | |
2 | 120,000 | 240,000 | 360 | 0.30% | $8.00 |
3 | 80,000 | 240,000 | 320 | 0.40% | $8.00 |
4 | 50,000 | 200,000 | 230 | 0.46% | $13.33 |
5 | 30,000 | 150,000 | 144 | 0.48% | $40.00 |
6 to 9 (avg 7.5) | 30,000 | 225,000 | 147 | 0.49% | $200.00 |
10+ (avg 15) | 20,000 | 300,000 | 100 | 0.50% | $600.00 |
The arithmetic for the fourth impression: it costs $8 ÷ 1,000 = $0.008 per person and lifts the purchase rate from 0.40% to 0.46%, or 0.0006 purchases. That's $0.008 ÷ 0.0006 = $13.33 per extra purchase.
The fifth impression lifts the rate by only 0.02 points, so it costs $40 per extra purchase. If a new customer is worth $20 of ad cost to you, the cap belongs at 4 a week.
4. Correct for the Bias in the Curve
People who see an ad 15 times are often people who spend more time on Amazon and would buy more anyway. A cross-sectional curve flatters high frequency, so treat its optimum as a ceiling, not a target.
When the budget allows, test it. Split the ad group into two identical copies with different caps for three to four weeks and compare cost per detail page view and new-to-brand purchases.
Wasted Spend Above the Cap: The Math
Impressions beyond the useful cap are the cleanest waste in DSP, because you can count them. For each bucket above the cap, multiply its users by the impressions they saw beyond the cap, then multiply by CPM.
In the example above, with a cap of 4:
Excess impressions. 30,000 × (5 − 4) + 30,000 × (7.5 − 4) + 20,000 × (15 − 4) = 30,000 + 105,000 + 220,000 = 355,000.
Share of delivery. 355,000 ÷ 1,555,000 = 22.8% of the week's impressions.
Cost. 355,000 × $8 ÷ 1,000 = $2,840 a week.
What capping gives up. Using the curve, the capped users lose about 6 + 9 + 8 = 23 purchases out of 1,701, or $123 of spend per purchase lost.
Amazon says impressions suppressed by a cap are reinvested in reaching more unique users, not taken out of the budget. At the same CPM, $2,840 buys 355,000 impressions, or about 142,000 new people at 2.5 impressions each.
Amazon's frequency cap insights, on the ad group, campaign and frequency group pages, estimate this for you: impressions saved and reinvested, budget saved (impressions saved × CPM) and incremental reach.
Remarketing has a second ceiling. Our DSP bidding strategies guide shows why: audience × reach rate × cap × weeks × CPM ÷ 1,000 is the most a pool can absorb. A 25,000-person pool at 70% reach, 4 a week for 4 weeks at a $6 CPM tops out at $1,680 a month.
What DVA+ Quick Setup Does With Frequency
DVA+ quick setup asks for an objective, products or a brand URL, creative and a budget. Amazon's AI then manages targeting, inventory, bidding and delivery, and Amazon's DVA+ launch table lists frequency caps under advanced settings, not quick setup.
In practice, quick setup means Amazon decides frequency for you. That's reasonable for a broad awareness or prospecting test, where reach is the goal and the audience is large.
It's a poor fit for remarketing. A small pool without a cap you control is exactly where frequency runs away, so we build remarketing in advanced settings with ad group caps and a frequency group.
For awareness, advanced settings also let you set a reach or frequency goal. Amazon's goal-based bidding can target a frequency, for example 2 a week, and bid to hit it while spending the full budget.
Outside the US, most former DSP users still see the classic flow for now, with caps on orders and line items. US advertisers who sell on Amazon can also use Full-Funnel Campaigns, which are available in the US (Amazon still labels them a beta on the product page), but they don't offer the same per-tactic caps.
When a Frequency Cap Blocks Delivery
A cap that's too tight shows up as under-delivery, not as a warning. Amazon's adjustment guide suggests three steps, in order:
Relax the cap. For example, move 10 a day to 20 a day, or 1 per 15 minutes to 1 per 30 minutes.
Remove the worst-delivering ad groups or campaigns from the cap or frequency group.
Temporarily disable campaign or advertiser-level caps until delivery recovers.
Amazon adds that loosening a cap can strengthen delivery but may weaken performance. Before touching the cap, check the other three causes: bid, audience size and supply filters.
Mistakes We See With Amazon DSP Frequency Caps
One cap for everything. Prospecting, remarketing and streaming TV need different numbers, and a blanket cap is wrong for at least two of them.
No ad group caps. The campaign default allows a small remarketing pool to take every impression it can.
Overlapping campaigns, no frequency group. Views remarketing, cart remarketing and halo campaigns often reach the same people. Group them.
Reading the average, not the distribution. An average of 3 can hide 20% of people at 10+.
User caps on TV. A per-person cap on a shared living room screen lets one home see you several times an evening.
Assuming deals obey the cap. Programmatic guaranteed and Amazon Audience Guaranteed lines keep delivering past it.
Raising bids on a capped audience. If frequency or audience size is the limit, a higher bid buys the same people at a higher price.
Our posts on Amazon DSP targeting and excluding audiences in DSP cover the audience side of the same problems.
How We Manage Frequency in Adbrew
Everything above works by hand in Amazon Ads Agent. It gets heavy when you run dozens of ad groups across several brands and need to check every distribution each week.
Adbrew is an agentic retail media management platform for Amazon and Walmart, and frequency management sits beside DSP, AMC and Sponsored Ads in one place:
DSP with a team behind it. Run Amazon DSP through Adbrew's seat with no minimum spend, or connect your own DSP account. The value is the team, the AMC audiences and the automation around it.
Automation you can read. Rules you set for bids, budgets, audiences and frequency caps, with your own thresholds and guardrails, and every change logged.
AMC without SQL. Pre-built AMC reports such as path to conversion, time to conversion, overlap and new-to-brand, plus custom audiences you can activate in DSP or use as exclusions.
Answers from a sentence. Ask an Adbrew Intelligence agent for "share of users at 10+ impressions by DSP ad group, last 14 days" and it builds the report from your data.
More than 5,000 brands, agencies and aggregators run their Amazon advertising on Adbrew, and K2 Health used AMC through Adbrew to lift conversions 20.28%.
Set the Caps Before You Raise the Budget
Most frequency problems are budget problems in disguise: more money than an audience can absorb at a sensible cap. Set a cap on every ad group, group the campaigns that overlap, and read the distribution every week.
Want frequency, AMC audiences and DSP reporting in one place on your own account? Book a demo and we'll walk through your caps with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good frequency cap for Amazon DSP?
There is no universal Amazon DSP frequency cap; Amazon recommends testing. In the accounts we manage, we start prospecting at about 3 impressions a week per user, remarketing at 3 to 5 a week, cart abandoners at 1 a day and streaming TV at 2 to 3 a week per household, then adjust after two to three weeks of data.
What is the difference between a campaign and an ad group frequency cap?
An ad group frequency cap limits one tactic, such as views remarketing. A campaign frequency cap, formerly the order cap, limits a person across every ad group in that campaign. Amazon applies a default campaign cap if you leave it blank, and combined ad group caps should never exceed the campaign cap.
What is a frequency group in Amazon DSP?
A frequency group is one frequency cap applied across several Display, Video and Audio campaigns, or every campaign in an advertiser or manager account. Amazon suggests setting it 10% to 20% below the sum of the caps inside. An advertiser account can belong to at most two advertiser-level frequency groups.
Should I cap Amazon DSP by user or household?
Cap by household for streaming TV, Prime Video and audio on shared speakers, where several people see one screen or hear one device. Cap by user for display, online video and remarketing on personal devices. Amazon's ad group setup asks you to choose user or household for each cap.
Do Amazon DSP frequency caps apply to Sponsored Products?
No. Amazon DSP frequency caps control only Display, Video and Audio impressions. Since February 2026, unified reporting can de-duplicate reach and frequency across DSP and Sponsored Ads accounts, so you can measure combined exposure, but sponsored ads have no frequency cap you can set.
How do I find the optimal frequency for my DSP campaigns?
Read the User frequency (1) to (10+) columns in unified reporting, then build a response curve in Amazon Marketing Cloud with the Optimal Frequency solution or the "DSP Impression Frequency and Conversions" query. Set the cap where one more impression per person costs more per extra purchase than a customer is worth.
Why is my Amazon DSP campaign under-delivering with a frequency cap?
A cap that's too tight blocks impressions once the audience is used up. Amazon suggests relaxing the cap first, for example from 10 to 20 a day, then removing the worst-delivering ad groups from it, then temporarily disabling campaign-level caps. Check bid, audience size and supply filters too.
Can I set a frequency cap in DVA+ quick setup?
Amazon's DVA+ launch lists frequency caps among the advanced settings, while quick setup lets Amazon's AI manage targeting, bidding and delivery. To control frequency yourself, open advanced settings and set ad group and campaign caps, or use a frequency group across campaigns.
