Incremental Reach: The Stat You Should Be Tracking

Despite our well-documented reliance on smartphones and laptops, research shows that the majority—77% in fact— of digital ads are viewed on televisions. Linear TV can’t be ignored either, it makes up half of US TV viewers. Advertisers are making use of both linear TV campaigns as well as connected TV (CTV) campaigns to reach their target audiences on the most important screen.

But how do you truly know if your ad campaigns are reaching their full potential? If you’re doing any form of multi-platform advertising, incremental reach is an essential metric to track to get the most from your campaign.

WHAT IS INCREMENTAL REACH? 

At its core, incremental reach is the unique additional audience a new channel provides. Typically, incremental reach refers to the unique audience CTV or over-the top (OTT) ads target over traditional linear TV advertising. While some campaigns utilizing CTV might overlap with linear TV, there is a growing group cord-cutters who have ditched traditional broadcast TV and are only found on CTV or streaming.

Digital ads on connected TVs or streaming services include:

• Video ads

• Sponsored content

• Banner Ads

Incremental reach helps you measure the cost-effectiveness of your CTV/OTT campaigns. It can help optimize frequency to make sure you’re not overserving targets and simplify attribution by identifying who saw which ad and where.

Incremental reach helps you measure which share of the market you’re reaching through OTT video campaigns and the cost-effectiveness of those campaigns.

As cord-cutting grows in popularity and more people move to streaming for their media and entertainment, incremental reach is a key metric to track the effectiveness of each advertising platform in your campaign, and ensure you’re using your advertising budget efficiently. 

HOW IS INCREMENTAL REACH CALCULATED?

In the most basic example, let’s say you ran a campaign that had both linear and digital viewing options. Some of your audience will only see the ad campaign on live TV, some audience members will only see it through digital services, and there will be some audience members that view it on both live TV and digital services. Incremental reach takes the total viewership and then removes all of the audience members who viewed the ad only on live TV, as well as those who saw the ad on both live TV and digital services. The remaining audience, who only saw the campaign as part of a digital service, is the incremental reach. 

There are several common methodologies used to calculate that unique audience, but two common ways are Automated Content Recognition (ACR) and household modeling.

ACR is built into most connected TVs and anonymously monitors the content being watched in real-time as well as live feeds of broadcast television to identify connected TV users who are viewing linear content, and thus remove them from the incremental reach for CTV/OTT ads.

Household modeling uses a variety of available data sets to estimate unique audiences. Typically household modeling looks at set-top users as well as broadband-only subscribers, combined with third-party demographics, but data quality and availability can vary from market to market.

HIGHLIGHTING DIFFERENT PLATFORMS

Incremental reach is frequently used to differentiate between analog marketing and digital marketing, but the metric can be applied to other marketing activities to.

It’s possible to use incremental reach to measure how individual platforms perform within a larger campaign. Instead of separating TV and digital, it’s possible to use incremental reach to separate interaction and view statistics between social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This gives you better insights into how successful your campaign is on different platforms and helps you create future ads personalized to consumers based on those data points. 

WHY IS INCREMENTAL REACH IMPORTANT? 

Digital media has transformed the landscape of entertainment and media. A growing number of consumers have completely removed themselves from TV and cable. Marketers are having to change their tactics to accommodate the digital revolution, which now includes online ads and cross-media campaigns.

Incremental reach analysis helps you better understand and track the success and reach of multichannel campaigns, better measure which platform is most effective at reaching your target audience, and flatten your new frequency curve by using a multi-stage journey across multiple channels.

Simply put, incremental reach gives your company the power to better manage when and how consumers receive an ad. With that increased control, you can better target consumers and personalize your ad campaigns. Personalized ads have a higher click-through rate and conversion rate because they show consumers that the company understands who they are and what their individual needs are, rather than treating them as just another number. 

PRECISE ADVERTISING WITH AGILITY

Advertising should not be a multi-channel hodgepodge with little-to-no cohesion in the advertising experience. We understand successful advertising is serving the right ad to the right person at the right time in the buying journey on the right platform. Get one of those wrong and you could be wasting ad spend.

The data-driven optimization of the advertising experience is called precision advertising and it’s changing how companies are approaching their marketing strategy. Learn how precision advertising with Agility can drive down key metrics like CPA and CAC and drive attributable new revenue.