Use the Reach & Frequency Planner

Try budget, flight, CPM and frequency cap in a rough calculator built on fixed assumptions, and learn what it can tell you before you quote a client.

The Reach & Frequency Planner is a rough calculator. You enter a budget, a flight, a price and a frequency cap, pick an audience, and it draws a reach curve and a frequency spread. Use it to compare "what if" plans quickly in a client conversation.

It is not a forecast built from real delivery. Read the next section before you quote any figure from it.

What it is, and what it is not

It is a fixed formula in your browser. The page says so under the button. Your impressions are the budget divided by the CPM, times 1,000, spread evenly over the flight. Each day a household sees at most one ad, and every household in the audience has the same chance. Run it twice with the same inputs and you get the same result.
It doesn't use LtvAdx data. It does not read your clients' past delivery, publishers' traffic, or the household audiences held in LtvAdx.
The audience sizes are fixed planning figures built into the page. They are not counts of households you can buy. Some audience names are written for India, such as the income band in rupees.
It doesn't create or change anything. It doesn't save your inputs, make a campaign, or reserve inventory.
It does not predict completion rates. There is no VCR figure.
The frequency cap only limits impressions per household. A household can get at most the cap times the number of weeks in the flight, counting a part week as a whole one. Impressions above that are not bought, so the cap can lower impressions, average frequency and GRPs. It never changes reach. Actual caps are set on line items. See Pacing and frequency.

For results that come from real delivery, use Reach and frequency under reporting, or Client reports.

Steps

Open Reach & Frequency Planner.
Enter the Total Budget (USD) and Flight Duration (days). The page shows the daily budget under the flight.
Enter the Target CPM (USD). Impressions are the budget divided by the CPM, times 1,000.
Enter the Frequency Cap (per week per HH).
Choose a Target Audience.
Select Run Forecast. To change an input and try again, select Re-run Forecast.

What you see

Result	How the page works it out
Unique Households	The households the model says see the ad at least once by the end of the flight, and their share of the chosen audience
Avg Frequency	Impressions divided by unique households. Under it, the most one household can get under your cap
GRPs	Impressions as a percentage of the audience, the same as reach % times average frequency
Impressions	The impressions the model delivers after the cap, and the part of the budget they use
Projected Reach Curve	Reach by day. It rises quickly, then flattens as more of the audience has been reached
Frequency Distribution	How many times reached households see the ad, in buckets, from the same model
Reading Your Forecast	Plain hints. They say whether reach is still rising or flattening in the model, whether average frequency looks high or low, and how many impressions the cap or the one-ad-a-day limit leaves undelivered

The cost per GRP is the part of the budget used divided by the GRPs.

Using it well

Use it to compare plans against each other, for example the same budget over 14 days and over 30. The direction of the difference is useful. The exact numbers are not.
When a plan matters, check the real numbers after the campaign starts, in Client reports and Reach and frequency.
A very small audience with a large budget gives a very high average frequency. That is the model saying you would be buying the same households repeatedly.

If something goes wrong

What you see	What to do
Results look odd or empty	Check the inputs are positive numbers, then select Re-run Forecast.
The menu on this page is shorter than elsewhere	This page and a few other agency pages show a shorter menu, without Client Reports, Download Center or Alerts. Open those directly: Client Reports, Download Center, Alerts.