You know that irritating friend on Facebook who posts nothing but Farmville updates, all day every day? If you’re not keeping your Facebook ads fresh by cycling them, you are that friend.

We’ve found that Facebook ads act differently than normal Pay-Per-Click ads. Often when setting up online ads, we’re able to use suppression files and smart cookies, allowing us to stop ‘bothering’ those users who’ve already ignored an ad. The result? We’re used to setting up ads and forgetting about them until we reach our budget.

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t have a frequency limit or other settings that could prevent re-targeting. So if you aren’t careful with the size of your audience and cycling different ads, you could be sending the same ad to the same people and minimizing your impact. The smaller your audience size, the quicker this will happen.

So, what can you do to avoid this pitfall? The best thing to do is to keep an eye on your click-through rates. Often your rates will drop within 24-hours (although not always). If your rates drop by 50%, it means you’ve already reached your audience and it’s time to refresh.

Bonus tip: Avoid waiting up to 2 days for Facebook to approve your updated ad by by setting up multiple versions ahead of time. Then just pause the ones that you plan to use later, so that you can cycle through your ads right away.