Reach—the number of people exposed to a particular ad—is a critical metric to advertisers for planning and measuring the success of campaigns. In the offline world, advertisers know that, if they buy time on back-to-back television shows, they are likely to reach many of the same people on both. That is, the advertisers are likely to experience duplication of reach across shows, as both are on the same network, the same night, with similar audiences.
In the online world, duplication of reach across sites is not as straightforward to predict. While many web sites have the same users, to what extent are those users exposed to the same campaign across those sites? Given that most advertisers tend to buy sites in similar genres, many expect to experience significant amounts of duplication. For example, if an advertiser buys ads on ESPN.com and FoxSports.com, will the same web site visitors see the ads on both sites?
To help marketers understand how much duplication there is across sites in a campaign, Microsoft Advertising Institute set out to answer the question, “To what extent do advertisers today reach the same people via different web sites in a campaign?” The answer is important, because it helps marketers mitigate media dollars wasted by reaching the same users on multiple sites.
As expected, the study shows that as an advertiser has greater reach, more people see the ads on more than one site. Surprisingly, though, the same person rarely sees an advertiser’s ads on more than one site—even in large campaigns. In other words, it is a myth that advertisers reach a significant overlap of the same people among the sites in each campaign. In fact, advertisers do not experience significant duplication across sites in a given campaign.
In most cases today, advertisers are buying small percentages of any given site’s inventory and, as a result, most advertisers observe very little duplicate reach. Unlike broadcast television or popular print media, for advertisers to reach greater numbers of their target audience online cost-effectively, it is a safe strategy to increase the number of sites they advertise on, without fear of excess duplication.
Microsoft Advertising Institute publishes Digital Marketing Insights (DMIs), a series of publications by digital marketing experts that help our customers improve their digital marketing effectiveness. Many of these findings are also made available to the digital marketing industry at large. Each DMI is designed to help marketers more successfully build value with their customers, throughout the customer lifecycle: from awareness to acquisition and from retention to growth. Microsoft Advertising Institute also provides education in digital marketing to Microsoft customers. Learn more about Microsoft Advertising Institute.
Download the complete Digital Marketing Insight report to learn more about research findings and key takeaways.
