Some of my channels seem more saturated than they should be at low levels of spend

The way the model defines saturation might not be the same as the way you define saturation. When we talk about saturation, it’s from an efficiency perspective, not from a “have we reached our entire audience in this channel” perspective. If it becomes more expensive to acquire customers in that channel, we will show that channel as saturated even if there’s still a large market of potential customers who have not been exposed to your ads. Here are a couple different mechanisms for what would cause saturation in the model:

• Too much frequency leading to “wasted” spend (e.g., if you just run your commercial back-to-back-to-back, the first airing might be helpful but the last one doesn’t add anything)
• Reaching “marginal” customers — if you spend money into marginal channels / time slots (e.g., MTV late-night) that can cause those “additional” dollars to be less valuable.
• Spending when CPMs are higher (if you keep reach & frequency constant, and CPMs go up, you’ll spend more and ROI will go down)

If the channel still seems too saturated, please reach out to [email protected] so we can investigate what might be going on.