Reach and frequency buying is a way of buying Meta ads where you book a campaign in advance, at a price fixed when you book, in return for a predicted number of people reached and a controlled number of times each person sees the ad. In Ads Manager it may appear under the name reservation. The alternative, and the default for most advertisers, is auction buying, where the price of every impression is set in real time.
How reach and frequency buying works
When you create a campaign in Ads Manager, the buying type is chosen at campaign level. Pick reservation (reach and frequency) instead of auction, and you then enter the audience, the dates, the placements and either a budget or a reach target. Meta returns a forecast: how many people it expects to reach, at what average frequency, and the cost. You can adjust the frequency cap, for example two impressions per person per week, and see how the forecast changes.
Once you reserve the campaign, the price is locked. Meta then paces delivery across the flight to hit the booked reach. You can also schedule a sequence, so people see ad one before ad two and ad three, which is useful when a story unfolds over several creatives.
There are conditions. At the time of writing (October 2026), the option is only offered for some campaign objectives, mainly awareness and engagement, it needs a fairly large audience size, and not every ad account sees it. Meta sets the minimums and changes them, so check Ads Manager rather than relying on a figure you have read elsewhere.
Why it matters
Auction buying is efficient but unpredictable. Your CPM rises when competition rises, which in the UK tends to happen from Black Friday through to Christmas, and you cannot know your exact reach until the campaign ends. Reservation trades some efficiency for certainty. That suits campaigns with a fixed date and a fixed message: a product launch, a new shop opening in Manchester, a festival, a January sale where the media plan has been signed off in advance.
It also gives tight frequency control. In auction buying, a frequency cap is only available on certain goals, and frequency can creep up on a small audience. With reservation buying, frequency is part of what you book.
For most small and medium UK businesses chasing leads or sales, auction buying is still the better fit, because reservation campaigns optimise for reach rather than conversions. Reservation is a tool for brand and awareness work where reach is the point.
Common mistakes
- Using it for conversion goals. It buys exposure, not purchases. Measure it on reach, recall and later search or direct traffic, not on cost per sale.
- Booking too early or too late. Prices depend on demand for the dates you pick; book once the creative and dates are firm, not on a guess.
- Ignoring cancellation terms. Cancelling a reserved campaign after launch can still leave you paying for what was delivered, so read the terms shown when you book.
- Setting the frequency too high. Seeing the same ad six times a week rarely persuades anyone more than three times does, and it costs more.
How to act on it
Start by writing down what the campaign is for. If you need a set number of people in a set area to see a message by a set date, run a forecast with reservation buying and compare it with what an auction campaign at the same budget achieved last time. Use the reach and frequency calculator to sanity-check the forecast. If the reservation price is close and the certainty matters, book it; if not, stay with auction and add a frequency cap. I plan and run awareness and video campaigns of this kind as part of Facebook video, Reels and Stories ads.