After adding all campaigns and clicking 'Create Report', the report page is shown with three components:
- The top drop-down menus provide additional parameters that can be adjusted to report data.
- The centre includes the actual reporting metrics and data visualised in various panels.
- The bottom has a list of selected campaigns.
On this page
Adjust report parameters
Changing the below parameters adjusts the reported data, so they need to be read and interpreted with these parameters in mind.
- Dates default to the available time period of the selected campaigns and can be narrowed down. For example, a campaign ran from May 9–27 but can be reported from May 15–21 to learn the 7-day, weekly reach.
- Demographic defaults to 'Female' and 'Male' 18–99 (Adults 18+), but can be narrowed down to other age-gender combinations. For example, since the campaign was set out to deliver primarily to 'Adults' 18–34, the parameter can be changed to 'Female' and 'Male' 18–34 to learn the adult 18–34 reach.
- Effective frequency defaults to 1+ and defines the number of exposures to a campaign a person has to have had to be counted towards people reached. By default, every person reached at least once is counted. However, if the effective frequency is adjusted to 2+, for example, then all people reached at least 2 times are counted and the report shows 2+ reach.
- Population: Based on the selected country, its census population is used by default to report reach percentage. Read Choose a location for your report for more information.
Note: The below parameters are only available for the digital video + traditional TV report that uses licensed, third-party TV data.
- TV Dates should ideally be equal in length compared to the digital video campaigns. As reach and frequency build over time and metrics are always tied to a time unit, a 7-day % reach on digital video campaigns wouldn’t be comparable to a 28-day % reach on traditional TV. Both time periods should be as close in length as possible, overlap as much as possible and ideally have the exact same start and end date.
- All TV networks are selected or reach and frequency data is reviewed with those selected TV networks in mind.
- TV cost can be adjusted to be higher, with adjustment factor of >100% or lower to factor <100%, than the default cost at 100% adjustment factor, that is only estimated by the third-party data provider and may not reflect the actual media spend.
Read metrics and interpret data
Any metric reported and visualised corresponds to the parameters selected at the top of the report page. The metrics change when parameters are changed. Metrics should be read with those parameters in mind.
Example:
The below parameters were adjusted:
- Dates: May 15–21 (7 days/1 week)
- Demographic: Females 18–49
- Effective frequency: 2+
- Population: Census
The below definitions can help interpret:
- 1+ on-target reach represents the number of people reached with a certain demographic such as age and gender, who have been exposed to a campaign at least once. When expressed as a percentage it is calculated by dividing the number of people reached by the total number of people in the population. Note that percentage reach changes from 1+ to 2+, …, N+ reach as defined by the effective frequency. It determines how often someone has to be exposed to be counted towards reach. It is shown in total for the selected demographic or visualised as '….'.
- Reach by demographic that shows individual age segments within the selected demographic.
- Average frequency is the average number of times a person is exposed to an advertising message during a campaign. Average frequency times the number of people reached equals the total number of impressions.
- Cost per on-target reach is spend divided by the number of people reached with a certain demographic such as target age and gender.
- Cost per point is spend divided by rating point (avg. frequency times 1+ on-target % reach)
- Frequency segment by demographic shows the distribution of frequency and provides more context when assessing the average frequency. Frequency segments describe how many unique individuals weren’t reached at all, also known as unreached population, were reached exactly once, exactly 2 times, exactly 3 times, …, or more than 10 times.
Note: The below metrics are are only available for the digital video + traditional TV report that uses licensed, third-party TV data to estimate the overlap across channels
- Digital reach describes the total reach across all digital video campaigns selected
- Incremental digital reach describes the estimated portion of digital reach that only digital contributed, which means that TV didn’t reach at all. This is mutually exclusive from Overlap reach because overlap includes reach on digital and TV. Overlap reach and Incremental digital reach add up to the digital reach.
- Overlap reach describes the estimated portion of reach that both digital and TV contributed.
- TV reach describes the total reach across all advertisers, brands or products when TV campaigns were selected.
- Total reach describes the total reach across digital and TV. It is the sum of TV and Incremental digital reach.
Methodologies
Statistical methods are used to get from total delivered impressions (observed) to the modelled number of unique people reached.
These methods leverage observed aggregated user behaviour across Google products and devices to determine cross-device usage patterns. Google Ads combines behaviour observations with other signals and local inputs such as census and probability surveys to deduplicate an audience across sessions, formats, networks and devices. The result is the number of unique people reached (not cookies) and exposed to an ad. Learn more about Measuring reach and frequency in Google Ads.
Further, the below Google Research publications explain some of our methods:
- Virtual people: Actionable reach modelling: A method for serving models that estimate reach and demographics of cross-device online audiences.
- Measuring cross-device online audiences: The method performs demographic corrections in the usual way device-by-device. A new method that converts cross-device cookie counts to user counts is introduced. We provide practical recipes for fitting this transformation function and then demonstrate its use using online panel data from Japan.
- Conditional independence approximation to cross-media incremental reach: The method to determine cross-media, digital video + traditional TV reach when cross-media single-source panel data are unavailable. This applies in specific countries where we licence third-party TV data that is source-independent from our own reach calculations.
Additional features
On the report page, users can also find additional features in the top right-hand corner:
- Download CSV will create a spreadsheet that includes the underlying data from the report in a more granular fashion across all available demographic brackets and effective frequencies. For example: While the report may be set to A18+/1+ Effective frequency, the CSV includes Females 18–24, Males 18–24, Females 25–34, across 1+, 2+, …, 10+ effective frequency.
- Copy setup link to save and share with collaborators that have Google Ads access.
- Send feedback to Google by:
- Suggesting an idea how we might improve our products
- Reporting an issue, something in our products that wasn’t working
