The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from The Advertising Research Foundation

Strategies for Managing Online Reach and Frequency

Websites’ abilities to reach consumer audiences vary. Some, like MSN or Yahoo! email sites, generate high reach quickly, while others with a narrower, more specialized focus, like Bicycling.com, may reach a sizable audience of interest to certain advertisers (of bikes and gear, for example), but take longer to reach all of them. Reasons why they vary have to do with consumer behavior, consumer interest, website content, and website popularity.

DoubleClick, a major web advertising infrastructure company, serves ads and provides media professionals with tools to manage most aspects of online advertising—ad targeting, ad serving, and monitoring and analyzing campaigns. In a joint study with online audience measurement firm comScore Media Metrix (both firms are profiled in the Appendix on measurement), Lynn Bolger and Marie Pauline Mörn analyzed their audience data to explain website reach from a number of angles: light versus heavy internet users; the composition of website visitors; and usage patterns (the time of day or day of the week when visitors frequent a website or the portions of a site that see more traffic than others). These different lenses on online audience reach have valuable implications for media planning and strategy (Bolger and Mörn 2004). (When it comes to online advertising, our interest is in regular users of the internet and viable prospects in our category who can purchase our brand. The best way to think ...