Reach and Frequency Still Matter
3 things to consider when developing your next digital advertising campaign
With the allure of targeting and measurability, marketers continue to shift advertising money toward digital channels. In fact, digital advertising has become the fastest growing advertising category, surpassing television spend as of 2017. Breaking down digital advertising into its component categories — display, mobile and social media advertising — all have experienced growth over the past five years.
For many, digital advertising has become a blunt instrument for precision and performance metrics. An instrument wrapped up in low cost CPMs and high-level effectiveness scores, and somehow treated differently due to the belief that traditional advertising rules and metrics no longer applies. It’s easy to see why we continue to focus on what can be measured in the short term.
We also know digital advertising (referring to display, mobile and social) can be used as a brand-building tool. Unfortunately, the system and the selling of the system don’t favor using digital advertising to affect long-term goals. Not only does this create an unnecessary divide, but it also makes asking questions regarding how digital advertising can brand build much more difficult. There are better questions we can ask, especially when we consider our category and the information-seeking behavior of our audience. Many of those questions deal with reach and frequency.
No matter the channel, reach and frequency are both important to producing advertising effects. In some ways, setting reach and frequency goals should be easy, but I have found three important points to consider when planning your next campaign.
Distribution of frequency matters
If we think of digital advertising as a house, its foundation has been constructed to support an ecosystem of direct response. Through trade desks and ad exchanges, a façade of precision is constructed. However, we know that digital advertising can be an important brand building tool. Given the long-term nature of our industry and the “rule of 7,” controlling for frequency across your campaign timeline is important.
Unfortunately, frequency is rarely distributed evenly (remember the house analogy). According to Ming Wu, while the end-of-campaign calculus may indicate 70 percent of your audience was exposed on average 7 times (calculated as total impressions divided by number of exposed individuals), the raw data, more often than not, tells a different story. The graph is much more “long tail” in nature. According to Wu’s work, 50 percent of impressions are typically concentrated on 18–20 percent of the audience.
While this might be acceptable for direct response, your ability to reach your targets effectively is diminished when distribution curves are polarized at the extreme highs and lows.
Frequency capping can help
Many argue the one-and-done nature of an advertising exposure, yet there’s much to learn about how frequency produces advertising effects online and how those effects vary from direct response to brand building. There seems to be some consistent research indicating the magic range is between 6 and 10 exposures before returns are diminished.
One way to manage frequency-related issues is by placing a “cap” on your frequency counts. For example, frequency caps can be used by a vendor to control for the overexposure of ads. For the typical brand campaign in higher education, Facebook recommends a frequency cap of approximately 2 exposures per week. For display advertising Trade Desk recommends a cap of once per day.
Mass reach can be digitally-driven
In many ways, digital and social media perform like traditional media. Both provide a platform to reach large audiences through paid media. As Jerry Daykin wrote, “digital [advertising] is most effective when it plays by traditional rules, but does so better than traditional media can. The real advantage of digital is often when it can help us broadly reach more consumers, not specifically target fewer.”
Evidence continues to mount from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute that it’s a much better strategy to use advertising to reach as much of the category as possible. In tandem, digital advertising can greatly extend the reach of more traditional advertising tactics as well as other digital marketing tactics.
In terms of programmatic advertising, contextual or behavioral targeting can be a great way to do so. However, publishers are often forced to balance inventory and distributing impressions to advertisers. So there isn’t always a way to give every advertiser the best inventory and users. With ad blocking, browser privacy and media fragmentation, there just aren’t enough users to go around. To combat, advertisers can ask their agency to negotiate guaranteed audiences that specify the percent of ad impressions that will reach either target demographics or behavioral segments as well as guaranteed in-view impressions and audiences on the programmatic ad exchanges. Both can be verified assuming the agency uses third-party verification.
Getting frequency right
New research indicates that to maximize purchase intention, marketers should strive for an average frequency beyond 10 exposures. This is well beyond the frequently-cited three-to-10 rule found in most marketing textbooks. The effect is more prominent in high-involvement categories and categories that require frequent information-seeking behavior.
Outside of providing frequency direction, this stream of literature seeks new ways to link the number of exposures to consumers’ “underlying purchase motivations, on the basis of their stage in the hierarchy of advertising effects or the consumer decision-making process.”
Instead of focusing on multiple ads with similarly framed messages, evolving the message throughout the entire path to purchase can be more effective (not just switching out “learn more” for “apply now”). In “Revisiting the Relationship between Ad Frequency and Purchase Intention,” the authors proposed a planning model that provides a framework for planning:
Phase One: Attention
· 1–2 Ad Exposures: Seek to gain attention through emotional drivers using category benefits.
Phase Two: Purchase Consideration and Evaluation
· 3–10 Ad Exposures: Focus messages on benefits of brand, position of brand or reasons to believe brand claims.
Phase Three: Action
· 10+ Ad Exposures: Use emotional benefits to reinforce consumers’ belief about brand or help rationalize attitudes/behaviors toward brand.
Not only does this research provide a road map for message development, but can act as a way to build an integrated approach to your next communications plan.
Outside of our industry, advertisers are demanding more programmatic control, with some going so far as to take their programmatic in-house. While this isn’t a reality for many in our industry, we can take steps to improve the delivery and effectiveness of our campaign. In both cases, we still need to value how we reach out audience and with what frequency.
