The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from The Advertising Research Foundation

Chapter 3. Online Advertising Reach and Frequency Concepts

“How many ads should I show my prospects to achieve the effect I want?” For over a half-century advertisers have asked this question and researchers have studied it. You can appreciate the interest—how many people you reach and the number of times you expose your ad to them costs money. Underexpose your ad and you risk underperformance. Overexpose an ad and you may be overpaying for performance. Effectiveness does not improve directly as the number of exposures increases. According to a common industry rule of thumb, most brand objectives reach diminishing returns somewhere between 4 and 10 exposures to an individual. For direct response measures, recent thinking places frequency at lower levels.

Planning online advertising campaigns that achieve impression delivery in ranges brands specify requires marketers to adroitly balance target market reach and frequency of message. Doing so is one of the fundamental practices in advertising, both online and offline. In this chapter, we focus on the strategic aspects of online reach and frequency.

While new thoughts on reach and frequency are under way, the practical reality is that reach and frequency concepts and planning practices are firmly ingrained in online advertising today.

Online Reach and Frequency Measures Here is a list defining commonly used concepts and terms that will help you navigate through this chapter and the literature in general (comScore 2003). Percent ...