What is Reach?

AdTech Education Series - Fundamentals - Reach

  • 3 min read
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Our AdTech Education Series

Welcome to another installment in our series of posts wherein we dive into the basics of AdTech so you can fully understand what everything means and why it matters. We want to empower you to make the best decisions you can for your business. So sit back and join us!

Some Preamble

We highly recommend reading our first entry in our education series to get a sense of some fundamentals before diving into reach. What is CPM?

A Critical Look at Impressions

Impressions always come with a caveat. Its being shown to someone, but as for who that person in front of that computer is hard to say. We’re privacy advocates here so we don’t want to know and we don’t think you should either. That being said a component that can be important is ensuring the same person doesn’t see the same ad over and over again. The theory is they could get brand fatigue wherein they get tired of seeing your brand to the point of it negatively impacting you.

Brand Fatigue - Does it matter?

A customer who sees your ad again and again may get frustrated. A direct quote from the sourced study below:

While repeated advertising exposure can capture consumers’ attention, arouse their interest, and ultimately motivate them to make purchases, it is also essential to recognize that excessively frequent advertising campaigns inevitably cause consumers to become fatigued, unresponsive, or even irritated.

How do you prevent Brand Fatigue?

If we analyze the study the key to avoiding brand fatigue is having fresh, new content. Running the same campaign over and over again is what will lead to brand fatigue quickly. A strong advertising campaign need not be long nor wide-reaching, it can be tempting to try and maximize the cost of your creatives/copy however its important to remember there is a goal you are trying to accomplish and keeping brand fatigue in mind to create a multi-part campaign can in many cases be more effective.

So Reach sort of matters, how does it work?

Ultimately knowing how many unique people saw your ad depends on the confidence you have in the algorithm that indicates its the same person. In the sourced IAP OpenRTB protocol you can see what is provided to the DSP.

Here’s a quick summary of whats included and its relevance:

  1. Geo Information (IP or Lat/Long derived from it)
    • IPs change routinely and aren’t specific to a home let alone a person
  2. User Agent
    • A User Agent is a combination of your browser and OS and is easily spoofable and cannot be relied on
  3. SSP/Exchange User IDs
    • These are provided by the exchange/SSP and we don’t have any studies/statistics relating to reliablity/accuracy

Privacy Implications

The crux of reach is being able to identify that a particular person who has seen this before is going to see it again (or not if you’re optimizing for unique reach).

Critical Thinking on Reach

Now that we understand what it is, how it might work lets think about it critically. Most users have multiple devices (phone, computer, laptop, tablet, etc) so even if you’re able to narrow it down to them, how do you link their devices together? If you could, would you want to?

Ultimately we know Brand Fatigue matters however there are strategies to mitigate/avoid it in which case reach doesn’t become as relevant anymore. Is the invasive way its implemented worth the risk to your brand? If that answer is yes, can you trust unique is actually unique?

Sources

Optimal dynamic advertising policy considering consumer ad fatigue

OpenRTB Protocol - IAB - PDF