What Is Reach and Frequency in Advertising?
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Pathlabs Marketing |
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November 1, 2023 |
Reach and frequency have been popular concepts in advertising for decades, even before the digital era. However, there's continuous discussion about their precise definitions, their influence on ad strategies, and their relevance in today's campaigns.
This post will delve into the importance of reach and frequency in advertising, demystifying their role and illustrating how to harness them effectively.
The Importance of Reach and Frequency in Advertising
Reach and frequency are important metrics in advertising because they help advertisers discern the breadth of the audience they actually place an ad in front of during their campaign and how their impressions distribute across this audience.
What Is Reach?
Reach measures the total number of unique users exposed to an ad campaign at least once within a defined period of time. If an ad campaign has a high reach, this indicates the campaign’s ads appeared in front of many people.
Reach vs. Impressions
While impressions count the overall number of times an advertisement loads during a campaign, reach counts the actual number of unique users who saw the advertisement at least once during the campaign.
A unique user merely refers to an individual person, and a single unique user can see multiple impressions of the same ad.
For instance, a display campaign may have 2,000 impressions but a reach of 800 unique users. This means the ad loaded 2,000 times during the campaign, but only 800 actual people saw it, with the ad loading multiple impressions to these users.
Knowing the reach, in this case, helps us better decode how many actual people are seeing the ad campaign and avoid extrapolating our impact, which could occur if we just focused on the number of impressions.
How Is Reach Calculated?
Advertisers primarily rely on the digital advertising platforms they use for campaign execution to calculate reach. Google Ads and The Trade Desk, for example, can both include these metrics in report dashboards.
The goal when calculating reach is to quantify the number of unique users exposed to an advertisement at least once during the campaign. Advertising platforms will count this number of unique users by identifying them via cookies or their device ID.
To illustrate, if a user browses the web via their laptop device and sees an ad, the platform placing the ad will associate the user with a cookie placed on their device or their device ID. So, if this same device sees the ad three times, the platform will recognize the user, only counting them one time to get an accurate reach count.
Let’s make it clear, however, that reach has its flaws due to two reasons:
It is becoming increasingly difficult to track and identify unique users due to the depreciation of cookies and more privacy regulations in effect regarding tracking.
Reach is hard to calculate across devices: if a user sees the same ad on their laptop and mobile device, there is no guarantee the ad platform used for serving the ad and tracking will draw a lineage between these two devices and only count the user once.
These two challenges currently impact the validity of reach and whether we can actually discern an accurate number to depict the total number of unique users reached.
The Effect of Reach on Brand Awareness
Many believe having a higher reach results in heightened brand awareness; this is only true to an extent. Yes, in theory, if an advertiser gets their ad in front of more individual, unique users, this provides exponentially more opportunities for the users to engage and become aware of the brand.
However, just because the advertiser is displaying their ad to massive audiences does not mean that each unique user’s interaction with the ad will be powerful enough to grab their attention and generate a robust level of brand awareness.
“One of the biggest mistakes advertisers make is hitting too many people too few times.”
When Should You Focus on Reach?
If the metric is available and the measurement is accurate, teams should take reach into account, as once again, it adds an additional perspective to the actual breadth of the audience the campaign was able to, well, reach.
Furthermore, when advertisers aim to widen the top of their funnel, emphasizing high reach can be beneficial as it casts a broad net. This approach not only enhances brand visibility but brings in new user and business data the team can leverage to glean their target audience insights and eventually move towards prioritizing a more narrow reach and specific target profile down the funnel.
What Is Frequency?
Frequency looks at the number of times an ad for a particular campaign is displayed to a given unique user. If a campaign has a high frequency, it means that the ads are serving multiple times to the same unique users.
How Is Frequency Calculated?
Like reach, advertisers calculate frequency in different ways, commonly relying on advertising platforms and services to do it.
Frequency differs from impressions, as we are not trying to see how many total times the ad serves. Instead, the goal of frequency is to identify the average or general amount of times an advertisement for a particular campaign has served to a single unique user.
For example, a campaign may serve 2,000 impressions with a reach of 800 unique users. The frequency, in this case, is going to relate to how exactly these 2,000 impressions were served to the 800 unique users and how many times each user saw the advertisement.
Advertising platforms may have a complex methodology for calculating and reporting frequency, while others simply divide the number of impressions for the campaign by the reach. In the example above, if we divide impressions by reach, each unique user saw the campaign’s ad about 2.5 times.
Frequency Capping and Its Importance
While frequency is a metric teams can calculate after the fact, like in the example above, advertisers most commonly deal with the concept of frequency when setting up campaigns and performing frequency capping.
Frequency capping refers to limiting the number of times an ad displays to a given unique user within a certain time period.
Advertising platforms like The Trade Desk or Google Ads permit frequency capping. When setting up campaigns in-platform, teams will set a max for how many times their ad can display to a single user within a day, week, or the campaign's duration. The Trade Desk even allows an hourly frequency cap.
“Frequency caps are important because they give advertisers more control over their campaigns. They can set a frequency cap to avoid bombarding users with too many ads in a short time span, as well as ensure they are not spending too much of their ad impressions too quickly on a small group of users. It allows a more slow drip. ”
Conversely, when the advertiser aims to stimulate greater audience engagement or swiftly gain momentum for their campaign, they can increase the frequency cap, ensuring that users encounter their message more frequently to prompt action.
When Should You Focus on Frequency?
The frequency of an ad campaign should always be taken into consideration, as it is imperative to find a happy medium between effectively targeting users enough times to develop effective brand recall while also avoiding ad collision and creative fatigue.
Teams can consider implementing a high ad frequency when:
The campaign is for a new brand or to promote a new message
The brand has a low market share
The purchase cycle or campaign has a short duration
The message is either highly complex or not unique
Alternatively, teams should consider a low ad frequency when:
The campaign is for an established brand or message
The brand has a high market share
The purchase cycle or campaign has a long duration
The message is either not complex or highly unique
Finding Balance Between Reach and Frequency
Due to budget constraints, advertisers often find themselves in the predicament of choosing between prioritizing reach or frequency.
They can prioritize broad reach to get their ads in front of a large audience, but it will be incredibly expensive to show multiple ads at a high frequency to each unique user within this audience.
Conversely, advertisers can allocate their ad budget to high-frequency campaigns, targeting a more select audience repeatedly to drive them toward conversion. However, as the targeting becomes more precise, the cost per impression rises, and the higher the frequency per user, the fewer impressions and budget remain for achieving a large reach.
The key takeaway is that teams need to find a balance, which they can attain from testing to see what allocation of funds and tactics drive the best results.
Strategies to Optimize Reach and Frequency
Put Objectives at the Forefront
Teams should be cautious of running campaigns solely focused on reach or frequency. Instead, they should always return to their main goals and funnel. They should think about how many people they overall want to hit, what they want users to do after seeing an ad, and how much budget they actually have.
The Role of Quality Content
Regardless of how many times an ad serves or the audience size, if the ad content isn't compelling, engagement is unlikely. Thus, advertisers must prioritize top-notch content creation, which often comes from regular creative testing.
Avoiding Ad Fatigue
Too high ad frequency can lead to ad fatigue, where users either become indifferent to or actively irritated by repetitive content. To prevent this, advertisers should regularly rotate their ad creative and content, especially during high-frequency campaigns or when using prominent ad formats like CTV. Alternatively, they may want to implement a frequency cap, or expand or contract the reach.
Cross-Compare Reach and Frequency With Other KPIs
Advertisers can find value in comparing reach and frequency metrics with other campaign KPIs and data. For example, if the team sees their campaign has a large reach but a low click-through or conversion rate, this opens the doors to exploring which factors limit their audience from wanting to lean in. Could it be the creative? Is the audience targeting too broad? Does the frequency of the ad need to increase?
On the other hand, if they look at sales data and notice that users who tend to put products in their cart have a higher chance of converting within thirty minutes, the advertiser can try to increase the frequency of targeting these users during this specific window to pull them back into the funnel and make them take further action.
Utilizing Diverse Advertising Channels
For those keen on amplifying their reach, a multi-channel approach is advisable. Especially when leveraging various mediums like display, paid search, and paid social, teams can develop a powerful funnel.
It is important to remember, though, that while this strategy broadens the range of users accessed, tracking reach across these multiple platforms and channels can be intricate. To ensure no overlapping of impressions to the same user and accurate traffic attribution across channels, start with a select few and gradually expand.
Maximizing Your Reach and Frequency
When looking at reach and frequency in a campaign, teams can maximize their performance by taking these two metrics with a grain of salt.
For reach, although it lends perspective on how many actual people the campaign got an ad in front of, trying to hit a certain goal reach metric is quite arbitrary, as people seeing the ad doesn’t guarantee user engagement or other performance.
On the other hand, frequency, though it underscores the number of times a message is presented, it will never indicate a universally optimal number of times teams should serve an ad for it to be effective at driving user action. In reality, there are too many other factors that impact user action, apart from just seeing an ad a number of times.
The most effective strategy for maximizing reach and frequency is not to rely solely on them. Instead, it's crucial to understand when and how to incorporate these metrics into a more comprehensive, multifaceted campaign strategy that also considers content quality, targeting precision, audience behavior, and other performance metrics.
In Conclusion….
Navigating the advertising landscape requires a keen understanding of various metrics, with reach and frequency being popular indicators of a campaign's span and repetition. While both are instrumental in shaping an advertiser's strategy, they are not the end-all-be-all. Remember, while numbers provide valuable insights, they should be used as guiding tools rather than definitive solutions. Embrace a holistic approach, using reach and frequency as part of a broader toolkit, to truly maximize your advertising success.
