Tip: Calculating the Average Frequency for Your TV Campaign

A few months back, we launched a new addition to Report Center: Reach and Frequency reports for Google TV Ads. These provide you with insight into how often viewers see your ad, so you can determine whether your campaign is delivering on your goals. Today, we'd like to share a tip about something useful you can do with the data, once you create one of these reports.

You may be curious to know the average frequency for your campaign, or in other words, the average number of times a given television was exposed to your advertisement. Calculating this is simple.

1. Generate a Reach and Frequency Report from Report Center.

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2. Notice how many unique TVs were exposed to your campaign (Reach) and how often (Frequency). For example, in the report below, 50 TVs showed the ad once, another 20 TVs showed the ad twice, and 10 TVs showed the ad 3 times.

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3. To calculate the average frequency for your campaign, divide the total number of exposures, by the number of unique TVs exposed.

(Click on the image for a full-size version)

In this example the average number of times a given television showed the commercial was 1.5. Use this formula with your own data to understand how often viewers saw your ad. Then you can adjust your campaign based on these results. For example:

• If you wanted to decrease your frequency and increase your reach, you could do so by adding more unique networks for the same dayparts you are using now.

• If you wanted to increase your frequency and decrease your reach, you should bid on fewer overall networks.

You can always increase your budget to try to improve both your reach and your frequency, but keep in mind it's harder to achieve higher frequencies than higher reach.

Posted by Aly Makishima for Google TV Ads