Paid audience reach diagnostic

Purpose

Frequency and penetration are two of the most misread numbers in paid ABM. Teams panic at a healthy frequency, or they under-serve a warm pool while believing they are saturating it. This skill sets the right window and the right benchmark for each audience, then turns each reading into an action.

When to use

• Someone asks whether the team is over-serving an audience.
• Someone asks whether an audience is too small to be worth the spend.
• A campaign's results have fallen, and reach is a suspect.
• A list-based campaign needs a reach check before it scales.

Route elsewhere when:

• The question is which segments convert. Use paid-audience-segment-diagnostic.
• The question is the account as a whole. Use paid-account-audit.
• The question is creative fatigue on a single ad. Use creative-fatigue-rotation.

Inputs

• Reach and frequency for each campaign: impressions, unique people or accounts reached, average frequency, and the date window.
• The size of each audience pool, and the total addressable audience for each, such as all site visitors in the window or the full account list.
• The funnel stage and placement format for each campaign.

Definitions

• Penetration is the share of the target audience reached at all: unique people or accounts reached divided by the total addressable audience. It answers how much of the list has been touched.
• Frequency is the average number of impressions per reached person over a window. It answers how often each person sees the ad.

Procedure

1. Normalize the window. Convert any shorter window to a ninety-day basis before judging it. Do not compare a seven-day figure with a ninety-day band.
2. Classify each audience by role:
   • warm or retargeting,
   • cold prospecting,
   • right-rail or lower-attention placements.
3. Judge frequency by role. As defaults:
   • Warm and retargeting in-feed: a target of about fifteen to twenty-five over ninety days. Below about ten, the pool is under-served. Above about thirty with falling click-through, it is fatigued.
   • Cold in-feed: low and wide, roughly under three to five. Judge cold audiences on penetration, not frequency.
   • Right-rail: tolerates much higher exposure, because each impression carries less weight.
4. Judge penetration. A cold audience with low penetration is not saturated. It is under-reached. A warm audience with high penetration may be saturated.
5. Separate a saturated pool from a narrow source. A saturated pool has been reached widely and often, so more spend adds little. A narrow source is small by design, so the fix is to widen the source, not to lower frequency.
6. Turn each verdict into a fix:
   • under-served warm pool: raise budget or widen the source, and check the pool has enough people;
   • fatigued warm pool: refresh creative or cap frequency;
   • saturated cold pool: widen the audience or add a new source;
   • narrow source: widen the source definition before changing spend.
7. Check each fix against the bands at the next review.

Output

• For each audience, the ninety-day frequency and penetration, with the band it falls in.
• The verdict: under-served, healthy, fatigued, saturated, or narrow.
• The specific fix for each verdict, and the review date.

Quality bar

Every frequency figure is on a ninety-day basis. Cold audiences are judged on penetration. A saturated pool and a narrow source get different fixes. Watch for a weekly frequency compared with a ninety-day band, a healthy cold audience treated as over-served, and a warm pool under-served but reported as healthy.