CTV Reach & Frequency Planner
Connected TV is bought in impressions but planned in people. Enter your budget, CPM, audience size, and how often you want to reach each person, and this planner shows how many real people you will actually reach — and whether you are building reach or just paying for frequency.
Reach is the number of unique people who see your ads; frequency is how often each one sees them. A budget buys a fixed pool of impressions (budget divided by CPM, times a thousand), and those impressions split between reaching more people and reaching the same people more often. This planner takes your budget, CPM, target audience size, and target frequency and returns net reach, audience coverage, the average frequency you will actually deliver, and the cost per person reached — so you can balance reach against frequency before you buy.
CTV Reach & Frequency Planner inputs and result
How to use this calculator
- Enter budget, CPM, and audience sizeUse your flight budget, the CPM for your inventory, and the size of the audience you actually want to reach — not the whole platform.
- Set your target frequencyPick how many times you want each person to see the ad. Three to six is the usual effective range; higher wastes impressions on the same viewers.
- Read net reach and coverageThe headline is unique people reached; the sub-metrics show what share of your audience that is, the frequency you will actually deliver, and the cost per person reached.
- Watch for over-saturationIf the verdict warns you are over-saturating, your budget is too large for the audience at that frequency — widen the audience or trim spend.
- Validate with incrementality, then exportImpression-based plans are a starting point; prove the lift with a geo or holdout test. Copy a share link or export the CSV for the media plan.
RGM Expert Says
We plan CTV in people, not impressions, because the impression count hides the only thing that matters: how many real humans you reached and how often. A campaign can post millions of impressions and have quietly hammered a small audience eight times each, which is mostly wasted money. Reach and frequency together tell us whether a budget is building an audience or fatiguing one.
The most common mistake we fix is over-frequency on too small an audience. When the budget is large relative to the target, the platform keeps re-serving the same people because there is no one new to reach, and effective frequency climbs past the point of diminishing returns. The fix is usually a wider audience or a lower budget, not a different bid.
We treat this planner as the setup, never the scorecard. It sizes the buy; incrementality testing scores it. Once a flight is live we hold CTV to lift measured against a holdout, because reaching people is the means and changing behavior is the end — and only one of those shows up in an impression report.
How it works
A budget buys a fixed pool of impressions: budget divided by CPM, times a thousand. Those impressions divide between reach (new people) and frequency (repeat views of the same people). At your target frequency, reach is impressions divided by frequency, capped at the size of your audience. Coverage is reach over audience, and cost per person reached is budget over reach.
- CPM — cost per thousand impressions for your CTV inventory.
- Audience size — unique people in your target; the ceiling on reach.
- Target frequency — average exposures per person you are planning for.
- Net reach — unique people the plan actually reaches.
Real reach curves are not perfectly linear — reach saturates as frequency rises — so treat this as a planning estimate and confirm delivered reach in your platform and lift in a holdout. See RGM’s CTV field guide.
Why reach and frequency beat impression counts
Impressions are the easiest CTV number to inflate and the least useful to plan with. Two campaigns with identical impressions can perform completely differently: one reached a million people three times, the other reached a hundred thousand people thirty times. Only reach and frequency separate the two, which is why every serious media plan is built on them rather than on a raw impression total.
Frequency has a sweet spot and a cliff. Research consistently puts effective frequency in the range of roughly three to six exposures; below it the message does not stick, and well above it you are paying to annoy people who already got it. Planning to a target frequency, and watching the frequency you actually deliver, keeps a budget aimed at new reach instead of quietly re-serving the same households.
Reach and frequency size the opportunity, but they do not prove it. The honest scorecard for CTV is incremental lift — reaching people is the input, changing behavior is the output. Use this planner to build a sensible buy, then validate it with a geo or holdout test, and you avoid both under-reaching your audience and over-paying to saturate it.
CTV planning benchmarks
Typical CPMs and the effective-frequency range. Your delivered numbers depend on inventory and audience; verify in-platform.
| Item | Typical range | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Premium streamer CPM | ~$35 to $50 | Direct/PMP, high viewability |
| Mixed / curated CPM | ~$25 to $40 | Balanced cost and quality |
| FAST / open CPM | ~$15 to $25 | Cheaper, more variable quality |
| Effective frequency | ~3 to 6× | Below: weak recall; above: diminishing returns |
What the experts say
TV can be as measurable and performance-driven as search and social.