New findings from Nielsen suggest that while advertisers may be getting scale in their digital campaigns, that doesn’t mean they’re reaching the audience they want.
Using data on 280 Canadian campaigns tracked by Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) during its first year in-market, the company found that campaigns had varied success in reaching large numbers of consumers in their target demographic. In its report, Nielsen said that even campaigns that served the same number of total impressions had widely varying in-target reach, based on what category they were advertising in, what demo they were targeting and how effective their tools were. Within a sample of campaigns that all served 10 million impressions, some reached as much as 36% of the total target population, while others reached as little as 2%.
In other words, scale doesn’t equal success – advertisers have to work hard to locate the right audience and serve ads through channels that will reach them.
Three out of four campaigns reached less than 10% of Canadians – which could either mean that advertisers aren’t getting effective scale, or they’re focusing their campaigns on highly targeted groups. So far digital is still dominated by direct-response marketers, looking for specific, high-value consumers that are likely to lead to sales.
Another finding was that Canadian men are far easier to reach online than women. Campaigns targeting men aged 25-54 reached 43% of Canadians in that demo, while campaigns targeting women in the same age bracket reached only 31%. Campaigns that targeted 25-54 consumers across both genders reached 54%.
Reach across different language demos was fairly even. English-language campaigns’ digital reach was higher than French campaigns’ reach by only 2 percentage points, on average.
By category, CPG was the most successful in reaching its targeted audience, with 61% effective reach on average. The other four categories tested were not far behind — auto, financial and retail scored in the mid-to-high 50s, and pharma was the lowest with 48%. CPG’s lead in the data may reflect the category’s deeper investment in digital and early commitment to audience targeting technology.
Getting more reach for your buck
The report suggested that campaigns that use data to make real-time course-corrections ultimately have a better chance of reaching their audience. Looking deeper at 15 randomly selected campaigns, Nielsen found that campaigns that used OCR results to shift their budget from low-performing sites to higher performing ones were able to boost the number of in-target impressions by 18%.
Nielsen says the findings support audience guarantee-based buying, where advertisers pay only for the audience they reach, rather than the total impressions served. Audience guarantees are standard practice in television, where advertisers pay based on ratings points rather than air time. In digital, however, major publishers and marketplaces are only recently beginning to offer guarantees based on independent measurement.
Nielsen has been one of several measurement providers pushing for gross ratings points (GRP) buying to become the standard means of providing an audience guarantee, meaning advertisers pay media suppliers for GRPs rather than gross CPMs. GRP has the added benefit that it makes digital media reach comparable with that of television — an important point for Nielsen, whose core business is in television measurement.
Other potential metrics for audience-based currencies have also been suggested, such as the viewable impression, which is the standard held up by the cross-industry Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) coalition. Viewable impression is a less aggressive measurement of reach, based on real-time measurement of whether impressions had the opportunity to be seen by a viewer (rather than whether they were actually seen, which can only be determined by polling online users, as Nielsen does for its GRPs).
