If you’re a media buyer, you know that audience numbers for out-of-home and sports club advertising are often more wishful thinking than reality. At Grassroot Media, we take pride in being transparent and evidence-based, especially when it comes to our bowls clubs, where our data is rock-solid and our assumptions are conservative.
Here’s exactly how we calculate reach, footfall, and impressions for bowls club screens, step by step:
1. We Start With Real Club Membership Data
Our process begins with the average membership figure for each bowls club. This isn’t a guess: it’s the number clubs give us directly, based on their own records. For our network, the typical club has around 250 members.
2. Calculating Footfall: Every Visit Counts
But not all members are equally active. So, we break it down:
- Some members play once a week, some two or three times, and some just come to socialise.
- We also count away players (visiting teams) who rotate through each week.
We use each club’s actual breakdown (from our spreadsheet) to calculate how many visits happen each week. For bowls clubs, this typically works out to about 750 visits per club per week.
Multiply that by the number of clubs (say, 17), and you get 12,750 total visits per week.
3. Unique Reach: How Many Different People See Your Ad?
Footfall tells us how many visits, but not how many unique individuals. Here’s how we get to unique reach:
- Week 1: We start with the core membership and regulars (about 250 per club).
- Week 2: We add the influx of new faces (visiting players) bringing the two-week unique audience to 8,500 across all clubs.
- For longer campaigns, we conservatively estimate that about half the new footfall each week is genuinely new, reflecting the mix of regulars and visitors.
This means our unique reach is not just the same people counted over and over; it’s a real-world estimate of different individuals exposed to your campaign.
4. Impressions: Calculated, Not Inflated
Impressions (or impacts) are the total number of times your ad is likely to be seen. Here’s our method:
- The average visitor spends about 1.5 hours per visit in the clubhouse.
- A typical campaign with us plays once every minute on the screen.
- We conservatively estimate that, given socialising and attention patterns, each person notices the ad about 36 times per visit (not every play, but a realistic, research-backed figure).
So, for a two-week campaign:
- Total footfall: 25,500 visits (12,750 × 2)
- Total impressions: 25,500 visits × 36 ad views = 918,000 ad impressions
It may feel high, but when you’re sitting in front of a full motion, dynamic advertising screen, it’s pretty hard to not look at what’s on there, we actually think that in real-life our impacts figures are actually higher than this.
5. Why Our Numbers Matter
- Transparent: You can see our spreadsheet, our club data, and every assumption we make.
- Conservative: We’d rather under-promise than over-claim. Our numbers are defendable in any pitch or audit.
- Realistic: We reflect how people actually behave in bowls clubs: regulars, visitors, and away teams, all interacting with your campaign in a genuine community setting.
In Summary:
For a two-week campaign on bowls club screens:
- Unique reach: 8,500 people
- Total footfall: 25,500 visits
- Total impressions: 918,000 ad views
All based on real club data and conservative, transparent calculations.