• by May 12, 2004

A couple of reps for an online publisher walked over to me last week at one of the season's numerous media events and mentioned that their website had doubled its reach in the past year. While their website's monthly reach is quite impressive, well into the millions, I told them that I would be even more impressed if they could tell me what the frequency distribution of their reach is.

When I started out in this industry, a vendor's monthly reach number held a lot more value to me than it does today. I have learned that even with an ample budget for fixed placements, there is a chance that, depending upon how people use that site, your advertising may not even scratch the surface towards effectively hitting that site's purported monthly reach number. This is what I call "The Reach Fallacy."

A website's reach may be comprised of a spectrum of different users. At one end of the spectrum, there are those who visit the site once or twice a month, while at the other end there are those who visit twenty to thirty times a day, if not more. While these two types of users are treated the same in terms of absolute reach numbers, their usage pattern can have a profound impact upon your advertising campaign. More specifically, it will affect the frequency with which they see your ads.

Let's say that you are advertising on a financial site. Of that site's reach, about 10 percent are active day traders who check the financial news about every half hour. The other 90 percent are long-term investors who visit the site perhaps once a week to scan the headlines for major stories. It is not difficult to conclude that the laws of probability strongly favor your ads reaching the active day traders.

If your client wants to specifically target the heavy users, then this frequency effect may not seem all that bad. However, the problem is that over the course of a month, the habitual visitor may be exposed to your advertising far more times than what is optimal to either build your brand or convert them into a customer. The average frequency of the heavy user can be off the charts, well into the hundreds of exposures, for any given month.

Even worse, is when the goal is not merely to target the heavy user, but everyone else that goes to that website. Because the habitual visitor consumes a disproportionate amount of ad impressions, a media buy often reaches far fewer people than what would be expected given a site's unique reach number. On the financial site, for example, the active day traders who represent 10 percent of the reach may be receiving 90 percent of your total purchased impressions.

Financial sites are far from the only verticals that have habitual users. Just think of any industry or activity that has a sub-segment of the population that can be categorized as high level enthusiasts. Sports. Gaming. Gambling. Emailing. All of these activities have high volume users. Think of the Yankees fan sitting at his desk at work going online every five minutes to check the score of the game.

Frequency capping is one solution to the reach fallacy that has been slow to gain acceptance by both the media agencies and publishers. This is when the advertiser places a limit on how many ads a particular site visitor can see in a given amount of time. Depending upon the technological constraints of the publisher's server, frequency caps can be implemented based on the number of ad exposures that may occur during a session, day, week, or month.

By placing a limit on ad exposures, the frequency cap essentially re-distributes impressions, shifting them from a few heavy users to a broader audience of people. It does not mean that you have stopped adequately marketing to the heavy user/enthusiast, if that, indeed, is your goal. What it does mean is that you have brought their exposure level down to a point where you believe your advertising to have optimal effect. At the same time, you gain much broader reach because all the extra impressions are now distributed to people who do not visit the site as often.

Third-party planning tools like WebRF and Atlas' GRP Forecaster can help an agency unveil the frequency distribution of websites. They can help the planner understand how difficult it can be to achieve reach on a site that has a relatively high unique reach number. When faced with this contradiction, the best insurance that the agency and advertiser has to protect their media investment is the frequency cap.

Greg Rogers is Director, Strategy & Insights, The Digital Edge, New York, a unit of WPP Group's Mediaedge:cia.