Gross rating point (GRP) is a statistic used to express the number of people reached by an advertising campaign in a given medium or over a given period of time. It is one among many statistics that advertisers use to explore how well their campaigns are working. Additionally, gross rating point is used to make decisions about how, where, and when to advertise in order to reach the most people.
Two things are involved in a gross rating point. The first is the identification of a target audience and a determination of what percentage of that audience sees an advertisement, which is known as reach. The other component is the number of times the audience sees the material, known as frequency. People find the gross rating point by multiplying the reach by the frequency.
One important thing to be aware of with gross rating points is that they can count audience members multiple times and this can result in a reach of more than 100%. This is the result of adding up opportunities for exposure over time. For example, if a company airs an ad over four different episodes of a television show, it considers the number of people in the target demographic viewing the show each night and adds them together to find the reach. This is multiplied by the number of times the ad was shown to determine the gross rating point.
The bigger the media vehicle, the bigger the reach. This can make up for limited frequency in some cases. From the perspective of advertising companies, an ad that reaches 80% of the target demographic five times may be better than one only seen by 12% of the demographic 20 times. This is an important consideration to weigh when evaluating gross rating point and the relative success of an advertising campaign, along with other metrics used to analyze advertising success.
Advertisers want to reach as much of the target demographic as often as they can to familiarize people with their products and ad campaigns. When assessing how well a given ad campaign worked, one of the metrics used is the gross rating point. This statistic can be used to compare a campaign with other campaigns for the same product, as well as campaigns for competing products made by other companies. If the gross rating point is high and the relative returns are low, it suggests that something about the campaign is not working.