Understanding OOH impressions, CPM, reach and how to use them
Published: July 8, 2019
In the world of advertising, companies want to know how many people are seeing their ads. It’s the job of the out of home company or agency to deliver that information in a way advertisers can understand. Here is a look at the several ways this information is being reported, how to read the data, and understanding it.
Traditional methods:
It all started with traffic counts – first introduced in the 1930’s. They were the staple of audience measurement for decades. The problem is that they are somewhat flawed when using them to tell how many people actually look at a billboard ad. So, agencies began using DEC’s (Daily Effective Circulation), which are simply a traffic count, minus the opposing direction of traffic, multiplied by 1.5 (the average number of people in a vehicle). DEC’s and traffic count are still widely used today.
A newer method:
Many out of home companies are embracing the latest technology in audience measurement: Geopath.
The Geopath method involves:
- Traffic counts, vehicle occupancy and pedestrian volume.
- Traffic and walking speed in relationship to the display’s position.
- Demographics and observed behaviors based on anonymous mobile location data.
While out of home measurement techniques are evolving more rapidly than ever before, the important thing to remember is “why?”. The answer is competition. With newer measurement techniques, out of home can now compete with one of the biggest advertising platforms used today: online/digital (facebook ads, google ads, etc.) for the billions of advertising dollars spent every year.
How do you as an out of home company compete for these dollars?
First and foremost, your inventory has to be available to advertisers all over the U.S., not just locally. A programmatic company like Adomni will showcase your inventory to an audience much larger than you ever dreamed possible. Additionally, Adomni’s Audience IQ technology provides audience intelligence reporting (using anonymous mobile data) to better understand which consumers see your billboards. Pairing that technology with your audience measurement data will help you compete with not only other out of home companies, but online advertising platforms as well.
Other OOH audience measurement terms:
Impressions: The total number of times people are likely to notice an ad on an OOH display.
Reach: The approximate percentage of a target audience’s population who notice an advertising message at least once during an OOH campaign.
CPM (Cost Per Thousand): The cost of delivering 1,000 impressions from individuals who notice the advertising on a display.
Stay tuned for part 2 (Targeting Specific Audiences in OOH)
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