How to increase the reach of a digital campaign?

Campaign reach is one of the important digital campaign metrics that tell us how many audiences our ads have reached. In other words, reach is the number of people who have seen a campaign or ad at least once in a given time period. Reach is one of the main parameters for evaluating the effectiveness of a campaign with the goal of increasing brand awareness In most cases, the advertiser will focus on optimizing the campaign in such a way as to obtain the lowest cost per viewer from the target audience.

Cost to reach 1000 people

In online marketing, it is usual to operate on the cost of reaching 1,000 audiences. This indicator is often confused with the so-called CPM, which is the cost that an advertiser pays to get 1,000 impressions of an ad. A display does not equal a unique user, so generally, the cost of reaching 1,000 people will be higher than the cost of 1,000 impressions.

CPM is a key element in the analysis and strategy of advertising campaigns optimized for brand awareness. Marketing also uses what is known as effective CPM, or eCPM, which shows how much revenue you will generate on average as a publisher. This indicator is most often used by website owners using Google Adsense, for example.

Reach does not necessarily mean interaction, but it is always a precursor to interaction. Without reach and interaction, we won’t have traffic and, next, sales, which is the lifeblood of any business. Even if the recipients of your campaign don’t click the ad, just seeing your product or name causes them to remember it. In Facebook Ads, you can use a metric called the estimated increase in ad recall rate, which will tell you what percentage of people will remember an ad within two days of seeing it.

If you would like to increase reach, optimize outreach costs, or tap into new audiences in your online campaigns, I’ve put together some hints on how this can be done optimally.

Check that you don’t limit your audience groups

In most cases, the problem with generating reach is due to too narrow audience groups In Google Ads and Facebook Ads, you need to ensure at least 1,000 people in a group for your ads to display. However, even exceeding this requirement does not guarantee effectiveness. 

When the groups are still small (e.g., no more than 10, or 20,000) and you operate with a large daily budget, your budget will be used inefficiently. You will probably get a similar number of impressions (or clicks) with the same budget. The only thing that will increase is the CPM rate.

Ad systems “like” to operate on large audiences – they then have more opportunities to reach, get lower CPM, and effectively broadcast ads at specific times of the day, or test copy. The larger the group, the generally lower the CPM. This does not change the fact that if you have a precise target group, you should not give up on it. You just need to find the optimal focus.

Use smart-targeting

The second reason for limited coverage is the limits set at the rate level. If you are still using manual CPC rates, imposing a limit that is too low, you will not win auctions and generate reach. A good substitute for manual CPC rates is a click maximization strategy. In this case, Google Ads will try to meet the set daily budget while getting the minimum cost per click.

You can also use the conversion maximization, and conversion value maximization strategy for targeting. Both of these strategies don’t require limits and probably won’t block you from generating maximum reach with a fixed daily budget.

Targeting is a great way to maximize your reach.

Test similar-receivers groups or audience expansion

Google Ads will soon extinguish so-called similar users, a feature that creates audience groups similar to your customers. However, the option to expand audience reach at the ad group level still works. You can determine for yourself how “broadly” Google Ads should search for similar profile customers if it deems it beneficial with the strategy you have set.

In Facebook Ads, you can create lookalike groups yourself, which is one of the more effective ways to target ads on this platform. Facebook also provides an automatic group expansion feature. If you choose this option, the platform will automatically find audiences for your campaign, even if they fall outside the profile you specified when creating the campaign. 

Use dynamic remarketing

With dynamic remarketing, Google Ads can display products and services to people who have previously interacted with your website or mobile app. The Google Ads mechanism will also decide which type of ad layout is likely to be most effective depending on the person, location, time, and device. Dynamic remarketing allows you to get some of the lowest CPMs when it comes to online campaign types. 

Use an up and cross-selling strategy

Upselling is the strategy of selling a better, more expensive version of a product that a customer already owns (or is buying). A better version is, for example:

• a higher, better product model or
• the same product with additional features that increase the perceived value 

This type of strategy is the reason why we bought a 65-inch TV instead of the planned 45. It is also the reason why you may have purchased subscriptions that you do not use.

On the other hand, cross-selling is a strategy for selling products related to what the customer already has or what the customer wants to buy. Such products generally complement each other but are not required for a standard operation.

They are not required for a standard operation.

Using these strategies in online advertising allows you to obtain better campaign metrics, thereby generating lower outreach costs (more efficient use of budget).

Prepare remarketing lists at different times

Users who have abandoned your product are likely to:

a) are already aware of your brand (depending on how much time has passed)

b) have some opinion about the products or services you offer

Furthermore, the fact that they didn’t complete the conversion or abandoned the purchase of your services doesn’t necessarily mean that your product is no longer valuable to them. Try to analyze the retention curve and identify the touchpoints that are key to customer retention, or the points where you need to start taking proactive action.

Identifying these moments you will prepare a strategy to close the sale. This may include, for example, sending a catalog about the product, preparing visuals, receiving a discount, etc.

Identifying these points of contact will help you to identify the key points of retention.

Go to flexible formats

Flexible display ads will automatically adjust their size, design, and format to almost any available ad space. This ad format allows you to increase the reach of your online campaigns, as many more ad slots are available on publisher sites or apps. If you’re not yet using flexible formats, it’s high time to change that: you’ll only need a logo, two graphic formats, and copy ideas!

Location and language limitations

When choosing location targeting, remember that it will affect your estimated reach and the cost of your ads. The narrower the targeting, the more you will pay to reach a single user. Likewise with the language setting in your audience.

A proven strategy when remarketing is to get rid of additional language and location settings. These ways will allow you to take advantage of the entire remarketing lists, without imposing restrictions.

There are a number of ways to do this.

Capping and its use

Capping is another way to limit the number of impressions per user. For example, setting a limit on the number of impressions to 10 every 24 hours means that one viewer can see your ad a maximum of 10 times per day. Google Ads customers have the option to use this feature for display and video campaigns, but not for ads on the search network.

In cases where the frequency becomes too high or low, this can cause problems with the campaign. Budgets can be misused and audiences can get tired of your ads. By limiting the number of impressions, you can prevent these situations.

As frequency increases, CPA naturally increases, because if users see the same ads over and over again and don’t take action, it means they are either not the right audience or are turned off by how many times they see the same ad. If the same ad has been displayed 15 times or more, it is likely that the customer will already be so frustrated that further displays will only bring further spending without increasing effectiveness.

In one study Adespresso it was shown that at a frequency of 9, the average cost per click increases by 161% compared to the beginning of the campaign. At the same time, the average CTR drops by almost half.

In another study Socialmediatoday the expected frequency between 1.8 and 4.0 yielded optimal performance. From the level of about 8 impressions per user, you can already see the most unfavorable trend.

Take advantage of channel synergy

Your best content is the content that appeals to viewers From there, you should start using organic content to promote it, get interactions, and traffic from it, and then use that traffic for remarketing efforts. 

Search engine users who see an ad will also be more likely to click on organic results from the same site. SEOs can also use PPC to easily test certain keywords that worked well and to potentially implement them to optimize the site.

Summary – online campaign reach

Reach and views are the main metrics for monitoring image campaigns. Reach can help you find out if something is wrong with your ads or campaigns – for example when audience reach is very low. On the other hand, if your content gets a wide reach, it means that it successfully reaches a lot of users, A separate issue remains whether users remember it, interact with it, visit your sites or apps, and make purchases.