Gross Reach

Anyone who runs advertising wants to know how many people have seen it. There are two very different ways of counting this. Gross reach simply adds up all individual viewing contacts. If the same person sees an advertisement on three consecutive days, that counts as three contacts. Gross reach therefore does not say how many different people were reached. It says how often advertising has hit eyes in total.

Why the figure is so large and so tempting

Gross figures sound impressive. A campaign with “20 million contacts” may in truth have reached only two million people who each saw the advertisement ten times. Both are correctly calculated, but they describe completely different campaigns. Anyone reading figures in press releases or advertising brochures should therefore always check which type of reach is meant.

For advertisers, the difference is hard cash. Anyone who wants to make a new product known needs many different people. Anyone who wants to imprint a brand, on the other hand, needs repetition with the same people. Gross reach alone cannot distinguish between these two goals. It is a measure of quantity, not a judgment of quality.

A related mistake is confusing it with net reach. Net reach counts each person exactly once, no matter how often they saw the advertisement. It is therefore always smaller than, or at most equal to, gross reach. Only if truly nobody saw the advertisement twice are the two figures identical.

The calculation behind the contacts

At its core, it is a multiplication. You take the net reach, i.e. the number of people reached, and multiply it by the average contact frequency. If a campaign reaches one million people who see it on average four times, the gross reach is four million. The same calculation also works in reverse, to estimate the number of people from gross figures.

Where the underlying data comes from depends on the medium. On television, measuring devices in selected households record what is running and who is in the room. From this, figures are extrapolated to the total population. On the internet, the advertising platform’s servers count every ad impression delivered directly. In industry jargon these impressions are called just that — impressions — and are practically the same as gross contacts.

Gross reach is often also converted into a percentage. These percentage values are called Gross Rating Points, or GRP for short. One GRP corresponds to contacts amounting to one percent of the target group. A campaign with 300 GRP has therefore generated three times as many contacts as the target group has members. Here, too, this says nothing about how many actual people are behind it.

Where the figure appears in campaigns and reports

The term appears most often in media planning. Before a campaign starts, agencies calculate how many gross contacts a given budget will generate. Advertising slots are bought and prices negotiated on this basis. The usual price comparison is called cost per thousand: it indicates what a thousand gross contacts cost.

The figure also appears in reporting on media companies. When a television broadcaster or an online platform presents quarterly results, reach figures are an important argument to advertising clients. Rising gross reach alongside a stagnating audience often simply means that more advertising slots were aired.

Recently, AI has come to play a major role in optimizing these figures. Advertising platforms automatically calculate whom to show an ad to and how often. In this way, they can deliberately control whether more new people are reached or fewer people are addressed more frequently. Anyone reading press releases about such systems should nevertheless look closely at which type of reach is meant.