Reach and eCPMs
Reach without reaching
CPM is a great way of getting pure reach at enormous scale. Advertisers accustomed to TV and print often set reach goals (usually expressed as GRP) for a good portion of the budget. It makes sense -- it's cheap and with a frequency goal there's an expectation that you'll at least imprint the audience with a simple message or value proposition. But there's one problem with pure reach as a metric: Digital ads are a bit more ephemeral and hard to audit than those in print magazines or running on reputable broadcast networks.
There are shenanigans we've seen that are every bit as repugnant as click fraud. Sites will put up impression burner pages laden with tens of ads -- no way for a viewer to crack that clutter. Or sites will sometimes put ad tags on redirect pages. The audience doesn't see, but the ad server doesn't know. You've seen sites that require you to continuously click through page refresh after page refresh to consume an article. That's setting up a bad user experience in order to burn impressions -- impressions on pages with low natural time spent are not going to imprint a message on anyone.
One particularly nefarious charade we uncovered recently was a site that served itself into an ad banner. What's that? Well, by playing this clever but dishonest game the site lived inside itself, so it was counting ad calls as impressions even though they were invisible. Imagine putting two mirrors facing each other and watching iterations of reality spin off infinitely. It's like that. And worse, each iteration was reporting to comScore, so the site's traffic looked phenomenal. When Joestoenails.com has Top 50 traffic, you've haven't spotted a trend -- you've spotted a game.
When looking for reach, it's important that you validate that your impressions are actually hitting eyeballs and staying in front of them for at least a little while. Dilution by abstraction
You're an AMD, and you've found a great new model for delivering results to your client. However, the client has worked hard to develop a media mix model and holds you accountable for eCPM pricing standards. Here's the problem: eCPM rolls up a lot of disparate tactics, each with its own unique metrics, and tells you how much you spent for them without assessing the relative value of those things.
You know what some buyers do to bring down their bottom-line eCPM? They buy the things that they know will be effective, and then they buy a lot of cheap, mass-impression bulk to bring down the eCPM. In order to appear to be saving money, they waste money. Should the clients be happy about that? Well, no, but they seem to feel good about telling their bosses how low they drove the eCPM. And you can fully understand why the buyer does it -- it's the only way they can deliver what they actually believe in while doing right by the wrong measure they're held to.
Rigidly looking at cost as the success metric ensures that you are over-spending. Annoyingly ironic.
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