5% Frequency in Internet Advertising

I had the opportunity to attend an internet selling "bootcamp", allowing me an extremely in depth training on the terminology and technology of selling internet. While much of the training was simply a refresher of things I already knew, I was a bit shocked by some new information - the idea of "share of voice" or frequency. This is very prevalent in the television world, and I'm finding local websites are just coming around to this.

I develop numerous sales packages for our department, and each one includes an internet portion. The typical package includes roughly 100,000 impressions - a nice round figure that sounds like a lot of impressions for a relatively small amount of money. That is, until I started doing the math. Our website reaches approximately 20 million page views monthly. At 3 ads per page, that's 60,000,000 impressions worth of inventory for sale. Buy 100,000 impressions, and your ad will be done running within the first hour of appearing! No wonder our local clients never see their ads when they come to our page.

Local websites are moving towards increasing the share of voice, or frequency on their site. We all know that the optimum TV campaign aims for a 3 frequency. For internet, every campaign should reach 5% of the total impressions for that area of the site where the ad appears.

To reach 5% frequency on the typical ROS campaign that we had been throwing into every presentation, then our campaigns should be reaching 3,000,000 impressions (60 million x 5%) instead of the 100,000 we had! Since few advertisers could afford to purchase that many impressions on a monthly basis, it is key that we limit each advertiser's campaign to specific sections of the site, or limit the advertiser to single weeks or single days in the week.

Another key area which seems to me to be a bit new to local websites is dayparting. Obviously, this is something we've typically always done in television. The dayparts are, of course, different than television. "Primetime" for internet is weekdays 8am to 4pm - typical internet surfing during the work day. (It is after all, the #1 white collar crime!) "Evenings" run 4pm to 1am. "Overnights" run 1am to 8am. Like television dayparts, different people are on the internet at different times, and even the same people will be on the internet for different REASONS at different dayparts.

To further increase frequency on internet campaigns, in addition to the restrictions I mentioned above, experimenting with dayparting has the potential to increase the effectiveness of the campaign.