In programmatic advertising, cheap reach refers to the process of buying low-quality ad inventories at a low cost. If you are a programmatic advertising campaign manager, you must be experienced with this cheap reach.
Mostly, cheap reach is not good for performance-based programmatic campaigns & awareness-based campaigns.
In this article, I have discussed cheap reach and its impact on programmatic advertising. Also, suggest how to avoid cheap reach in your campaigns.
Feel free to ask your questions in the comment section.
What is Cheap Reach?
Cheap reach is the process of buying low-quality ad inventories at a low cost. Mostly, these impressions are delivered on low-quality websites/apps, at the bottom of the nonviewable placements.
Many people think that the entire low-cost ad inventory is a low-quality ad inventory. If you are also having the same thought, please change it. The ad inventory cost will be high whenever the competition is high. So, we can’t say all the low-cost ad inventories are low-quality ad inventories.
For example, you are running an ad campaign to increase shoe sales. So, you have created a re-targeting campaign to target the users who recently visited your e-commerce site. The user X recently visited your site, and then X visited a premium website like mirror.com. Usually, the bid price for mirror.com is high, and many advertisers are bidding to show their ads on this site. Here, you need to pay more money to display your ad.
The same user is now visiting a new site, which is not a premium site. Mostly, advertisers are not interested in bidding on a non-premium site. Here, the competition is really low. So, you need to pay very little money to display your ad.
Here, your ultimate goal is to re-target the user. It does not matter whether the website is premium or not. So, all the low-cost ad inventories are not cheap reach.
BUT, you should be very careful when handling cheap reach. Otherwise, your campaigns effectiveness will be affected.
How Does Cheap Reach Affect Advertisers?
Advertisers spend their money on programmatic advertising to promote their business. The delivered ads must be seen by the users is very important for campaign success. The ads delivered on the non-viewable placements are a complete waste.
As per the research, a huge percentage of impressions delivered on display environment fail to the MRC standards. That means those ads are mostly delivered on the non-viewable portion of the website pages.
Media metrics demonstrate the poor quality of Cheap Reach placements. Across the full supply landscape, 91% of Cheap Reach display impressions and 95% of Cheap Reach video impressions fail the MRC’s viewability standards. (Source: Jounce Media)
Read More : What is Viewability? How To Calculate Viewability?
How can you identify and avoid cheap reach placements?
Strong ad verification and fraud prevention methodologies are helpful to avoid cheap reach.
By using viewability and brand safety technologies advertisers can identify and avoid cheap reach placements more effectively.
We mostly associate viewability providers with our programmatic advertising campaigns to calculate the ad viewability metrics. Most of us, just check the viewability at the campaign level. If it is above the benchmark then they leave the campaign as it is. But, I advise you to check the viewability at the domain or app level once a week. By removing the poor viewability domains, you can improve the viewability as well as the performance.
If you are running an awareness campaign, delivering the expected impression is not alone enough. Most of the delivered impressions should be viewed by the users is very important. So, you need to use viewability metrics more effectively to identify the cheap reach domains. Then, you can exclude them from a campaign to improve the effectiveness of the campaign.
Also, you can use brand safety in your campaign to avoid such kinds of bad inventories. Choose the suitable brand safety provider for your campaign to deliver your impressions more effectively.
Conclusion
Upon reading this article, you should understand the cheap reach and its impact on programmatic advertising. Using brand safety and viewability technologies you can easily identify and avoid cheap reach problems. A certain percentage of publishers or third parties created ad placements on non-viewable places to make more money. So, you need to identify and block those domains from delivering ads.
Identifying and avoiding cheap reach placement is also an important optimization strategy for programmatic advertising campaigns.
Read More :
