Reach & Frequency One-Pager: Package-Level Metrics

Reach and Frequency are powerful metrics for understanding the impact of an OOH campaign. This document provides a brief guide on:

• The importance of Reach & Frequency within a campaign

• How Geopath validates our Reach and Frequency approach

What are Reach and Frequency?

When someone is looking to measure a campaign’s effectiveness at reaching their target audience, some helpful metrics to do this are Reach and Frequency. Reach is the percent of your target audience that has seen your campaign, and Frequency is the average number of times the ad was seen over the course of your campaign by the target audience. Reach Net is the unique number of people who have seen your campaign. Reach and Frequency occur in an inverse relationship to each other at a constant TRP level. Within such a campaign, as Reach goes up, Frequency goes down, and vice versa.

Simply put, Reach x Frequency = TRPs.

How Geopath Estimates Reach and Frequency

In the past, Geopath’s Reach & Frequency approach was built around highly aggregated, anonymous carrier data. This mobile data was used to determine average frequency and understand general home locations, which allowed us to look at the footprint of audiences in different markets. However, there was no device-level data available to us at the time for validation of the approach. This lead to outputs from the existing methods that were misaligned for some packages of inventory, where higher package-level Reach across the market should have been reported.

Using observed movement data from a panel of mobile devices, today we are able to more specifically understand the trips that people take throughout a market – the purpose, the distance, the approximate route, and more. The observed device-level movement data allows us to cross-examine many scenarios at the unit and package level. The results are more accurate and in line with observed data, which may result in lower Reach percentages than what was seen in the legacy measurement.

Validating Reach and Frequency (Why is the approach correct?)

We first make sure that the panel of mobile devices is a representative sample for determining home location and trips, by observing the mobile signal and rest patterns. Roughly 83k devices observed over the 50 day period qualified for frequency analysis in Los Angeles. From there, we compare the observed mobile data with traffic counts on particular roadways from different DOTs, and live traffic counts. At this stage, we know there is a high level of alignment between the mobile data and the DOT data. Additional information on the methodology and validation can be found here.

Once we are confident in the trip volume, and that we’re able to observe a device over time, we are therefore able to evaluate the frequency of trips over time as devices pass by OOH inventory. Knowing that the panel of devices is representative of the movement in the market, we can then conduct Reach and Frequency analysis based around this. Device-level data allow us understand Reach and Frequency more closely, as we’re able to understand duplication and model at the device and inventory level.

Key Takeaways (considerations for the industry)

Geopath’s revised Reach & Frequency approach provides optionality for media planners that has been previously unavailable in the OOH ecosystem. This revised model allows planners to optimize for a reach percent of a target audience, or optimize for frequency of exposing their message.

These improved methods allow for a greater level of precision and accuracy in our ratings that reflect the true audience delivery. For example, higher frequency can now be observed when spots in a package are clustered in a localized area, and higher reach can be observed in a package of more widely-dispersed spots.