Digital ad budgeting is a balancing act between reach and frequency. You want coverage across as many platforms and formats as possible because voters don’t all live in the same place online. But, if you spread that money evenly across every channel, you’ll end up under investing – the ads ran but didn’t have their intended effects.
Similarly, maxing out a single platform only buys more frequency without reaching more voters. So how should you think about allocating your campaign’s digital ads budget?
Decide On Digital’s Share
Before you divide the budget among various digital channels, you’ll need to start by determining digital’s overall share of the paid media budget. According to Nielsen, streaming accounted for 48.6% of all TV watch time in May – YouTube claiming 13.8% of that. If you’re building your media plan on the assumption that broadcast still delivers the entire electorate, you risk missing the voters who aren’t paying attention to politics.
Your digital budget should be big enough to hit your target universe at a meaningful frequency. If it’s just a token buy you’d be better off scrapping it and investing in the channels you do believe in.
Start With Reach
You want to work backwards from coverage. Define your universe, estimate what share of it you can reach in the time frame allotted with the budget you have. If you can’t get your reach to where it needs to be it’s time to shrink the audience or grow the budget. Deduplicate your media plans to ensure the same inventory and same audience isn’t bought twice.
Protect Your Frequency
Reach without frequency is a waste of money. Plan for give to seven impressions per target voter over a two week period as a rule of thumb that can differ by platform. That’s enough for a message to penetrate without leading to fatigue.
Fewer channels funded properly beats a broader media plan every time.
Don’t Be A Slave To The Voter File
Every targeting method has its limits, and match rates mean a chunk of your file never gets reached at all. Relying too much on voter file matching can lead to paying a premium for a smaller audience that excludes the voters you actually want.
Channels with broad reach are worth funding even when you can’t tie every impression back to a voter file record. YouTube reaches 84% of adults in the US and deserves pride of place in your digital ad budgets.
Conclusion
An effective digital ad budget isn’t the one that touches the most platforms or reports the lowest cost per impression, but the one that reaches your target audience with the right frequency. Balancing these two objectives is the key to building your budget.