What Video Marketers Need to Know About iGRP

In the television world, gross rating points (GRP) have long been the standard metric that advertisers use to measure ad effectiveness. With the rise of streaming video, advertisers hunted around for a new metric, one that captured the viewer targeting available online. The winner, however seems to be online GRP, or iGRP. The advantage to using gross ratings points online is that it lets advertisers compare broadcast and online video ad spots, and it gives advertisers a familiar tool to use.

To answer questions about iGRP, online video advertising company Brightroll has released "What You Need to Know About Online GRP," a white paper that explains what iGRP is and how it can be used. Online video advertising is growing quickly, and there's a need to make ad-buying as simple as it is with television. This white paper clears up some of the confusion.

Television gross rating points multiply a show's rating points by how many times viewers could have seen a certain ad. In ad-speak, it's reach times frequency. iGRP has to use a different formula, since there aren't rating points for streamed content. iGRP then takes the number of impressions that an ad gets, divides it by the total number of online viewers, and multiplies that by 100.

Advertisers use this rating to determine what size percentage of a target audience they'll get by advertising on an online show. Brightroll notes that online video ads can target by much more than gender and age, as broadcast ads do, such as by beliefs, values, and more. Getting a common measurement system in use for online video ads is an important first step, but it's only a first step. The online world will certainly thrive with rich ad targeting in the future.

For much more on iGRPs, including how comScore and Nielsen use different methods to calculate the metric, download the free Brightroll white paper (registration required).

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net