1. INTRODUCTION

APT Strategies’ Australian Online Readership Survey allows media buyers to plan an internet advertising schedule that will yield the best value for money or return on investment. This document demonstrates the potential savings in using a well-planned approach by way of a worked example.

2. THE PROBLEM

The client has a new product for women aged between 18 and 44 and wants to promote it through PAY-TV and the Internet with an emphasis on reach over frequency.

3. THE SOLUTION

The first step is to determine which internet properties have a higher proportion of visitors who are Women aged 18-44, and given the emphasis on reach over frequency, who are also NON PAY-TV subscribers.

We can compare 84 internet properties on this criteria, but for this example, we focus on fifteen of the largest Australian web-sites for the sake of brevity.

We find that the percentage of visitors in the past month who meet the criteria is as follows:

We could conclude from the table above that if each of the web-sites were charging the same CPM (cost per thousand impressions) that the best value would be accomplished by advertising with the ‘over-achievers’ in our target, namely LookSmart, Fairfax at Market, NineMSN and Yellow Pages. However, different properties do charge different CPMs, and of course package deals are available, so it is suggested that a spreadsheet is setup with the actual cost to you included, so that value judgments can be made easily.

The spreadsheet would look like the table below, with the hypothetical $50 per thousand impressions for each site replaced with the prevailing CPMs.

By following these steps alone, value would be assured.

However, even further refinement is possible using APT Strategies’ data.

4. FREQUENCY & DUPLICATION

4a. Frequency

For the purposes of further analysis we’ll assume that the four over-achieving web-sites in our example are the best value buys and focus on them.

Females aged 18-44 with No PAY-TV access these sites at the following rate per month (i.e. of those who access each site at all):

Based on the table above, if reach (over frequency) was required, the ‘rotation’ requested from the publisher would be less for Fairfax at Market as this has the highest frequency of visits amongst visitors. For the other three, with visits per month in the 6-8 band, which is around the average, the ‘normal’ rotation would be accepted.

The publishers of course have access to their own ‘census’ results, and these should be made available to advertising agencies and used in conjunction with the sample results. Our research shows very different frequencies between the web-sites of ‘print weeklies’ and ‘print dailies’ as one might expect. The media planner will always bear in mind the difference between a ‘surfing’ or ‘casual’ site (e.g. Australian Wine Online) and an ‘application’ or ‘frequent’ site (e.g. ASX or SMH).

4b. Duplication

Having decided on these four sites, we now look at the duplication of viewer-ship amongst our target group.

These four sites would reach 72% of our internet target market. Looking now at the how that is made up we see that more that 50% visit ONLY ONE of our four sites in a month:

Again, with reach being dominant over frequency, we see that we should focus on Yellow Pages, NineMSN and LookSmart over Fairfax at Market to reach our target group.