Software solutions are notorious for confusing jargon, hidden pricing, and convoluted answers to simple questions like “what am I getting?” and “how much will it cost?” Audience intelligence platforms, though getting better, are guilty of the same thing. They make it hard to understand which tier includes which types of audiences and insights.
Tunnl is committed to keeping the options clear for our different platform tiers: There are three of them, and as you tier up, the audience insights available to you get more complex. Simple enough, right?
But knowing which level of the platform to pick to get the right audience insights for your ad campaigns still poses a tricky decision. Consider Tunnl Free and Tunnl Plus, our two most popular entry points into the Tunnl platform. They both get a lot of love from advertisers and agencies alike, but what really sets them apart?
We’ve spent years perfecting each tier of the Tunnl platform for our users. Telling you which is best would be like parents picking their favorite child.
Instead, we’ll take a deep dive into both platform tiers - what they can do, who they are for, how much they cost - and keep it real about when they may not be the right choice for you.
Build a Target Audience for Free with Tunnl Free
Best for: Advertisers and agencies planning or buying campaigns across multiple digital channels
Cost: Free
Users: Unlimited
Included features to use with all prebuilt audiences + any custom and/or U.S. Policy Opinion Makers audience subscriptions you may have:
- Demographic and national media mix insights
- Advanced search function that serves as a basic audience builder for custom audience combinations based on issues and geographies
- Audience activation in ad platforms
The try-before-you-buy mentality can be found in every shopping experience across industries. So why not audience intelligence platforms too? With Tunnl Free, you can do more than try the platform before subscribing. You can analyze audience insights including demographic data and media consumption insights, and activate audiences in your ad campaigns without limitations. It’s a fully-fledged platform with actionable value for digital advertisers and agencies.
What Comes with Tunnl Free?
Starting out with the free version of our platform gives you a chance to poke around without any commitment or in-platform cost. You get to explore hundreds of prebuilt audiences, each coming with three main features to influence your campaigns:
Audience Insights: See the demographic breakdown of your selected audience and, more importantly, get a glimpse into where they spend their time with national media mix breakdowns of major platforms like social media and streaming services.
Advanced Search: Slice and dice our hundreds of prebuilt audiences, as well as any custom and/or U.S. Policy Opinion Makers audience subscription you may have, to create more specified, deeply targeted audiences for your campaigns.
Audience Activation: Activate Tunnl audiences on your preferred ad platforms with the click of a button, and start targeting the curated audience of your choice right away.
Who Should Use Tunnl Free?
Because Tunnl Free comes with unlimited users and unrestricted access to our hundreds of prebuilt audiences, it’s an ideal choice for advertisers and agencies planning multiple or diverse digital campaigns. There are no recurring fees or locked-in subscription durations, so as your audience needs change, Tunnl Free is here when you need it without commitment.
And since it’s always free to use, it’s worth creating a Tunnl Free account to see the platform for yourself.
Who Won’t Benefit from Tunnl Free
Tunnl Free is perfect for people who need national insights for digital ad campaigns, but it isn’t ideal for everyone.
The insights available in Tunnl Free are designed to enable your digital ad campaigns, revealing which platforms get your target audience’s attention and how often. However, if you’re planning or buying media for TV campaigns, you’ll need Tunnl Plus (or our Premium platform tier) to reach the right people and improve your ad ROI.
“Most advertisers are already data rich,” says Amanda Beadle, Tunnl’s Senior Director of Customer Success. “The question becomes whether or not you have every layer of data you need to get the maximum value out of your campaign.”
Local media mix insights and a more robust Audience Builder are common reasons for upgrading Tunnl platform tiers, too. Since Tunnl Free only offers media mix insights at the national level and only supports simple audience combinations through Advanced Search, digital advertisers and agencies who need more flexibility or granular insights should consider exploring their options in Tunnl Plus.
Create Audience-Based TV Advertising Campaigns with Tunnl Plus
Best for: Advertisers and agencies planning or buying campaigns across multiple digital channels, streaming TV, and/or some linear TV
Cost: $5,000/month
Users: 3
Included features to use with your selection of 15 prebuilt audiences + any custom and/or U.S. Policy Opinion Makers audience subscriptions you may have:
- Local media mix insights
- Linear vs. streaming TV consumption breakdowns to compare advanced TV vs. linear TV consumption
- Enhanced audience builder for custom audience combinations based on linear TV and streaming consumption patterns, geographic radiuses, and demographic parameters
- Cable ranker to determine the best cable channels for your campaigns across all 210 media markets
Retain access to Tunnl Free’s demographic and national media mix insights into our entire prebuilt audience library and any custom audiences and/or U.S. Policy Opinion Makers audience subscriptions you may have.
Tunnl Plus is our middle platform tier and a step up from Tunnl Free. It’s a paid subscription that permits 3 users and gives you deeper insights into up to 15 prebuilt audiences plus any custom or U.S. Policy Opinion Makers audience subscriptions you may have. You’ll retain your access to national media mix insights for our entire prebuilt audience library as well.
Wondering what makes it worth the starting price of $5,000 per month? Here’s what you need to know.
What Comes with Tunnl Plus?
Leveling up to Tunnl Plus, all the joys of Tunnl Free come with you: demographic and media mix insights for hundreds of prebuilt audiences, access to a more dynamic Audience Builder to create, save, and share granular custom audiences in seconds, and the option to activate audiences in an instant. But wait, there’s more.
Tunnl Plus includes:
Local Media Mixes: Filter your media mix data by local geographies to get a precise picture of where, how, and how often a local slice of your audience is consuming media.
Linear vs. Streaming Consumption Breakdowns: Find out what percentage of your audience is high or low linear TV consumers vs. high or low streaming TV consumers.
Cable Ranker: See which cable networks are the most and least popular with your audience across all 210 local media markets.
Enhanced Audience Builder: Use this advanced audience builder to create custom audience combinations based on linear TV and streaming consumption patterns, specific geographical radiuses, and configurable demographic parameters.
These deeper insights are curated to align with how you buy media, making it that much easier to reach your target audiences and plan your ad spend with maximum efficiency. So, while Tunnl Plus does come at a cost, the investment pays dividends across your campaigns.
“Tunnl data is valuable because the media consumption and cable ranker insights are tied directly to an audience that can be activated in the space,” says Amanda Beadle, Tunnl’s Senior Director of Customer Success. “It's equipping you with what you need to know about an audience so that when you launch a campaign, you know you're reaching the exact right people, which is going to make your campaign more efficient and create less waste in the media buy.”
But do you really need these features?
Who Should Use Tunnl Plus?
Tunnl Plus will best serve advertisers and agencies who need deeper insights into where their target audiences spend their time.
“Tunnl Plus is a true middle ground for digital advertisers and TV media buyers,” says Elise Lewis, Tunnl’s Vice President of Product. “Tunnl Plus is more geared towards media buying shops and agencies who are working on behalf of a mix of clients that want to be able to find insights about television consumption you can’t get in Tunnl Free, but they might not necessarily need the granularity Tunnl Premium offers.”
If you’re using Tunnl Plus, you’re probably advertising often or ramping up your ad efforts. Agencies and advertisers with an extended ad calendar will get the most value from this subscription and its insights.
Sound like you? Tunnl Plus may be the right fit.
As we’ve covered, the monthly cost of Tunnl Plus starts at $5,000 for 3 users to gain local media mix and TV consumption insights for up to 15 prebuilt audiences, plus any custom and U.S. Policy Opinion Makers audience subscriptions you may have. You’ll still have access to national media mix insights for our entire prebuilt audience library too.
We can get you extra seats for $500 per month per additional user if you’re working with a bigger team of media planners. The same goes for audiences: if you need to analyze more than 15 prebuilt audiences with Tunnl Plus tools, we can unlock your access to more or swap out the ones in your dashboard.
But if you’re running a lot of TV ads, you may need more than Tunnl Plus to keep up with your campaigns’ complexities.
Who Won’t Benefit from Tunnl Plus
Tunnl Plus delves deeper than Tunnl Free, but even those insights can go leaps and bounds further. Serious TV advertisers will want more than the tools in Tunnl Plus. Enter Tunnl Premium, our utmost platform tier for the most serious linear TV advertisers and agencies.
With Tunnl Premium, achieve maximum linear TV advertising efficiency with our most advanced solutions: paid and earned media measurement tools to see how your audiences are performing against your linear TV campaigns down to the program level, competitive analysis, reach and frequency analysis, and an audience builder to create custom audiences based on reach and frequency data.
Tunnl Premium is ideal for avid linear TV advertisers but offers no benefit to digital media advertisers and agencies. Stick with Tunnl Plus if you find yourself in the latter category.
Tunnl Plus vs. Tunnl Free - Which is Best for You?
Picking the right tier of any new tech is tricky, especially when the finer details of what each level includes are unclear. But now that we’ve cleared up the differences between Tunnl Free and Tunnl Plus, it’s common to be struck by decision paralysis as you consider every detail we’ve shared.
If you’re still on the fence about which Tunnl platform tier to choose, the best way to decide is to see them side by side in a custom demo. But know this: There’s no right or wrong answer.
The Tunnl platform is the only place where all of these audiences, insights, and tools come together, all in one neat package for one simple price. Regardless of which tier you choose, the integrity of our data or how our audiences are built will ensure that you reach the right people in the most efficient and compliant way possible.
