Programmatic Reach is Less Than You Think
Also, check on volume concentration (large portion of your ads going on a small number of domains or apps)
How Much Reach Do Marketers Think They Get In Programmatic?
Expanding on the article above, written for marketers, which showed that reach in programmatic campaigns is far lower than they think it is, the following are some more details from the research.
Here’s how you read the table below. For each of the campaigns, there are 7 columns. 5,000 means 5,000 data points loaded into FouAnalytics, and the number below it is the number of unique domains (in the domains table of the dashboard). You will see that as we load more data points into the dashboard, the number of unique domains also goes up. In the 100,000 column where we have loaded 100,000 data points into the dashboard, you see the number of unique domains. These range from about 2,000 to 6,000. That’s the total reach for these programmatic campaigns.
The 75% and 90% columns take into account the impression volume. 75% means that 75% of the impressions were shown on X number of domains (the number in the column below). 90% means 90% of the ad impressions were shown on X number of domains. That gives you a sense of the concentration of your ads on certain domains. A similar pattern occurs when you use mobile apps too … a large number or percentage of your ads may be concentrated on a relatively small number of apps.
Be sure to do this spot check (look at the number of unique domains on the bottom right of the domains table in Fouanalytics) so you can see if your programmatic campaigns are too concentrated (too little reach). Note that this is not a bad thing because large numbers of tiny sites with no real human audiences are not going to do much for your business outcomes. Ping me if you have questions or need more help on this.
hey Augustine, great research.
however, I think it's well known (at least internally for people really understanding DSPs) that the more ad requests a domain sends the more bid responses a DSP will make, that's just how the basic nature of the programmatic as a pipeline works, right? Meaning, if it is expected to have a certain baias to sites-apps with higher volumes.
then what's interesting is how each platform may attack this standard issue, with placement diversity features or similar methods. Have you seen any of that in your experience?