What is reach in advertising?

Reach vs impressions vs frequency

These three terms show up together in almost every media plan, and they are easy to mix up. Each answers a different question.

The three are linked. Total impressions are roughly reach multiplied by average frequency. If you see an impression number with no reach figure beside it, you cannot tell whether a small group saw the ad many times or a large group saw it once.

Industry measurement guidance also separates types of impressions, such as an opportunity to see and a likelihood to see. The IAB's DOOH measurement overview is a good starting point. Reach built on an opportunity to see means a person was in a position to see the ad, not that they paid attention to it.

A simple hypothetical example

Take a made-up service lounge with a screen in the waiting area. Suppose your ad plays several times during the time a customer waits. On one day, five different customers wait there, and each sits through the ad three times.

• Reach: five people, because five different people were in the room.
• Frequency: three, because each person saw the ad three times.
• Impressions: five people times three exposures is fifteen impressions.

Now suppose the ad keeps running for a week. If the same five regulars come back every day, reach stays at five while impressions keep climbing. If a steady stream of new customers comes through instead, reach grows along with impressions. Same screen, same ad, very different pictures. The numbers here are illustrative only and are not CETV Now data.

Waiting rooms are interesting because people stay a while, so frequency within a single visit can be high. Dwell time is how long people stay in a venue. It affects how many exposures one person can get, but it is not a measure of attention.

Reach for a local advertiser

A big reach number is not automatically useful. If you run a dental practice, a salon or a single-location restaurant, most people outside your service area will never become customers. Reaching a whole region may be worth less than reaching the people who live or shop nearby.

So for local advertisers, the better question is usually: reach of whom, and where? Useful reach is the share of your reached audience who could realistically visit you.

CETV Now supports targeting by neighborhood, city, metro, zip code, sector or vertical, and individual venue. It can be layered with audience type and daypart (time of day). That lets you shape reach around the people near you instead of buying everything available. CETV Now is live in Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Nashville and Salt Lake City, and Miami is coming soon. For any other location, availability is unconfirmed, so send an inquiry.

To choose where your reach should come from, see how to choose venue categories for in-venue advertising and local DOOH advertising.

How reach trades off against frequency

With a fixed budget, reach and frequency pull against each other. Spreading spend across many venues, neighborhoods or time slots puts the message in front of more different people, but each person sees it fewer times. Concentrating spend in fewer places raises how often the same people see it, but the pool of people is smaller.

• Favor reach when many people do not yet know your business, such as a new opening or a new service area.
• Favor frequency when your audience already knows you and needs a reminder or a clear offer, or when the message takes a few views to register.
• Balance both when you have one local market and a short list of venue types where your customers already spend time.

No split is right for every advertiser, and no outcome is guaranteed. Ad insertion with CETV Now has no minimums and no long-term commitment, so you can set your own spend and schedule, start small and adjust as delivery reports come in. Reporting includes venue-level impression reporting and real-time statistics, and results vary by campaign. If frequency control matters to your plan, ask the team how it applies to your campaign.

Before you buy, write down your goal, your target area and the kind of person you want to reach. The campaign planning checklist and the guide to setting goals for a DOOH campaign walk through those questions. Regulated advertisers, such as healthcare, financial services, alcohol and legal, should also check their own compliance rules before running creative. When you are ready, CETV Now's advertiser page explains how to share your markets, venue categories, creative and budget to get a plan and a quote.