Are Gross Rating Points Relevant To Online Advertisers?
By Anna Johnson on July 15th, 2009More relevant to brand advertisers than direct response advertisers, Gross Rating Points or GRPs are a measure of the reach and frequency of an online advertising campaign.
Frequency is fairly straightforward: it’s how often an online ad is displayed. Reach, on the other hand, refers to how many targeted prospects were exposed to an online ad as a proportion of the total number of potential prospects.
For example, reach could be, as eMarketer’s CEO Geoff Ramsey puts it, an online ad reaching 20 million women ages 18 to 49, which is 25 percent of a total target universe of 80 million.
Already you can probably see that, as Geoff Ramsey points out, measuring reach in terms of page impressions is insufficient, as it fails to capture the percentage of the total desired target population reached.
Calculating a GRP metric is easier said than done, of course, but it does provide a means by which advertising media can be compared. Consequently, look for more advertisers – maybe you? – to look for GRP data, and for more online content publishers to start providing GRP data, in the near future. If they don’t, you can bet that online media agencies will start doing it for them.
Source: Geoff Ramsey, “The Great GRP Debate,” eMarketer, July, 2009
