Feathr works to be constantly vigilant in identifying opportunities to repair, maintain, and improve the ways your data are handled, calculated, and presented. One example of that kind of data you rely on is reachability. In an effort to improve accuracy in your budgeting, campaign strategy, and reporting, we have recently updated how reachability is calculated. Continue reading to learn more.
What is Reachability?
In the simplest terms, reachability is the measure of how many people in any given Group can successfully be served ads in your Retargeting campaigns. Note that reachability only applies to Retargeting campaigns.
You can read more about reachability here. Reachability is an important metric because it is used to estimate budgets and helps Feathr users understand how many potential people might see a Retargeting campaign.
Becoming "Unreachable"
One of the updates Feathr has recently made to the calculation of reachability is to create an avenue by which formerly reachable people might become "unreachable." The rule we have enacted as of late March 2024 is that any reachable person becomes unreachable after 120+ days of no tracked activity have passed.
The drop in reachability you may have noticed represents the reclassification of these unengaged people in your Groups. This means you are retargeting a higher quality group of people and are able to see who can be retargeted at a glance.
A fundamental principle of digital marketing is to not waste time, energy, or especially budget on unengaged audiences. 120+ days without visiting your website, interacting with an ad campaign, or opening emails from your organization is a clear indicator of disengagement, therefore they should not be included in your budgeting forecast or retargeting audience.
To maintain a healthy reachable audience you should engage with your audience members regularly throughout the year by running digital ad and email campaigns. Additionally, try incentivizing your audience to visit your website regularly throughout the year.
Becoming unreachable does not permanently remove someone from your marketing database. Should someone that disengaged and became unreachable re-engage with your organization's website, they will be updated to reachable again.
People vs. Devices
Previously, Feathr has calculated reachability using a cardinal aggregation model reflecting the number of unique TTD (The Trade Desk, Feathr's programmatic advertising partner) identifiers in any Group, within the individual breadcrumbs of person records within that Group. A breadcrumb is a unique trackable activity in Feathr. When the aggregation model was written, unique TTD IDs were a reliable metric to equate to reachable people. Over time, however, the database of TTD IDs has grown to no longer accurately represent individual reachable people.
This is because the same unique person can access your website, click on your ads, open your emails, etc. from multiple different devices. That leads to the individual people occasionally being assigned multiple TTD IDs, and being counted as more than one "reachable" person. This in turn leads to an unintended "reachability inflation." This even occasionally led to Groups in Feathr being reported with more reachable people than unique people!
Our team identified this inflation, understood that Feathr users need to know how many people they're reaching—not how many devices—and chose to revise how that number is calculated.
How was the Calculation Revised?
Reachability in any given Group no longer uses the aggregation model based on number of unique TTD IDs, but on number of unique Persons in the Group who have at least one TTD ID.
This revision, while making your reachability metrics significantly more accurate, will likely also have the effect of reducing that number. We regret that you may see your reachable people drop, but it is an investment in the reliability and accuracy of how Feathr reports data to you, the user.