The Difference Between Reach & Impressions Explained

Page views. Engagement rates. Instagram impressions. If these social media marketing terms have you scratching your head, and if the thought of peeking at your Google Analytics dashboard gives you palpable anxiety, you are not alone.

These charts and graphs can be very overwhelming if you don’t understand their meaning or purpose. Sifting through the sea of marketing terms, we believe two often misunderstood metrics you can benefit from learning about are reach and impressions.

In this article, we will define these important metrics and explain the difference between reach vs. impressions. 

Reach and Impressions Defined

Reach and impressions are both analytics tools. Reach refers to the total number of unique people who have seen your content, while impressions refer to the total number of times your content was shown. Let’s look at an example.

If 100 people have seen your content, this means the reach of your content was 100. Pretty straightforward, right? On the other hand, some of those same users may have scrolled by your content several times. So if your content showed up on screens a total of 200 times, that means the impressions for your content were 200.

Now let’s zoom in on each term individually, and discuss the types of each. 

Types of Reach

Reach refers to the total number of people who viewed your content, but not necessarily all of those people were your followers. Sometimes a big fraction of the number of unique users are people with who the content was shared or people who have viewed paid content.

This can be 20-30% of your reach, and even sometimes up to 60%. As an example, you’ve probably noticed that when your friend engages with someone’s content, their activity sometimes shows up in your news feed or Explore page.

Even though you may not be subscribed to that content, you are still part of the reach count. Several types of reach can be measured: 

• Organic reach: This occurs when your content appeared naturally in someone’s news feed. 
• Paid reach: Occurs when people see your content because you paid for it to show up in more feeds, and above other content. This especially refers to paid ads. 
• Viral reach: This type of reach occurs when the number of people seeing your content explodes because of the sheer popularity of your post. You got a lot of likes, comments, and shares, which has caused it to go viral (congrats!). 

Types of Impressions

One of the main concerns when it comes to impressions is whether or not the data is accurate. There are two forms of impressions. They are:

• Served impressions: To track impressions, we typically use ad servers. This is the current standard for tracking impressions online. Unfortunately served impressions are counted whether or not the ad or content has fully loaded, or is even in a viewable space on the screen. This indicates the data may not be entirely accurate.
  
• Viewable impressions: This method of measuring impressions is done by gathering data from a user’s device. It tracks impressions that have been seen by real humans. Viewed impression tracking identifies user behaviors that prevent ad viewing, like ad-blocking software, a screen resolution too small for ads to appear, minimized browser windows, etc. These instances are then excluded from the impression count. 

Purpose of Measuring Reach and Impressions

Analyzing the metrics of your content is all about helping you make decisions that will improve your digital marketing strategy. Data constantly changes, which is why it is always important to keep an eye on things like reach and impressions. 

Why Measuring Reach Is Important

Your reach count allows you to assess how many people are viewing your hashtags, posts, ads, events, and social media profiles. Why is knowing this number so important? Here are a few reasons:

• Measures brand awareness or popularity: The number represented by reach is the actual number of people you were able to impact. No bots or spam accounts included. If you’d like to increase your brand awareness, pay attention to reach. This is a more accurate representation than just follower count; you see how many people are shown your brand or content. These are the people who are aware of your business or offering. Keep in mind that sometimes the algorithm does not show your content to all your followers. This is another reason why your reach is sometimes smaller than your amount of followers. 
• Helps plan social media campaign: When you know the amount of reach your content gets on average, you then can estimate the impact your campaign may have and then plan accordingly. 
• Helps measure campaign success: Finding out how well your campaign is doing as it happens can allow you to pivot your content strategy if it isn’t hitting the mark you intended. You may need to try a different platform or format to expand your reach. 
• Evaluate the impact of partnerships: When you collaborate with another influencer or brand, you can easily see how much more reach has been generated by comparing it to your individual content’s reach. Then you can determine if the collaboration or sponsorship is worth repeating. But, remember to allow the passage of some time for enough data to come in before you make a conclusion. 
• Measures effectiveness of varying platforms: If you have a bigger reach on one social media platform over another, you may want to focus more energy in that space. 
• Track brand awareness over time: Social media management includes keeping an eye on your reach numbers over time. You can see how many more (or fewer) people are seeing your content, then figure out where you need to devote your time, energy, and resources for content production. 

Why Measuring Impressions Is Important

Remember that impressions indicate how many times the content was shown. Users don’t have to engage with a post for it to count as an impression. They may also make multiple impressions for one piece of content, which is how it differs from reach. 

Why is it helpful to track the impressions of your content? Here are a few reasons: 

• Measures your ability to present your content: If you see impressions increase, you know your content is appearing in users’ feeds more often. As a result, users will be engaging with the content, which increases social media engagement rates and expands brand awareness. If impressions decrease, then you know that the audience isn’t resonating with the content. It may not be optimized well enough for the platform you’ve shared it on, or you need to increase your content quality.
  
• Help prevent ad fatigue: If your post shows up an excessive amount of times, this may start to annoy the user. Tracking impressions allows you a finger on the pulse of the annoyance meter. You want to have a balance of having your content visible, but avoiding ad fatigue. If you think perhaps the impression count is too high, it might be better to focus on impacting reach more than impressions. 
• Moment-to-moment tracking: When you publish content or an ad, you can immediately see if gets any impressions. If there are very little to no impressions in the early hours, this is a bad sign that users are not engaging with your post. It more than likely will not perform well. You may want to work on its framing or the content itself. 
• Understand new audiences better: You can monitor what kind of users view your content, which then allows you to target them with the content they relate to most. As an example, if you post to multiple social media channels, you may notice one channel does better than others. Based on this information, you can then assume the average demographic of your audience. 

Targeting Reach and Impressions

Now that we have a good idea of what reach vs impressions mean and how they are helpful, we will now focus on how to target them. 

How To expand Your Reach

Although expanding your reach should be a part of your marketing goals, realize that your reach doesn’t matter if you aren’t targeting the right audience. Your social media strategy should be centered around the user. 

The algorithm will choose the content that has the most relevance to them, so make it relevant! Start by truly understanding your target audience, then make content that is fulfilling the need or interest they come to you for. 

Next, focus on finding where your target audience likes to hang out and focus on that platform. Work with influencers or brands to get your content in front of fresh pairs of eyes, and make sure your posts are reachable with the right hashtags, location, and tagging. 

Lastly, don’t be afraid to be bold with your content. This will keep your audience interested and then attract new users who want to see what you’ve got going on. 

How To Make The Right Impressions

So how many impressions should you shoot for to ensure your audience sees and responds to your content? You want it to show up enough times for the user to become aware of it, but not so many that they are annoyed by it. Finding the magic numbers takes some trial and error. 

1. Calculate Ad Frequency

Impressions will always be equal to or higher than reach. Those included in your reach count will have seen your post at least one time, but many people will have seen it a few times. To figure out the average of how many times each person saw the post, we will calculate something called ad frequency, also known as average impressions per user. 

To find the ad frequency, simply divide total impressions by total reach. As an example, if the total impressions were 200 and the total reach was 100, the equation would be: 

200 ÷ 100﹦2

So the average impressions per user are 2. The average user is seeing your content two times.

2. Finding Effective Frequency

Is this answer desirable or not? To determine whether this is on target, we would need to know your industry or product’s effective frequency. The effective frequency refers to the number of times someone will see an ad before they respond to it.

To figure this out, you may want to find out what numbers have worked for your competitors. Advertising research has shown that users need to see an ad at least a few times before they even become aware of a brand.

A good rule of thumb for ads is that it will take about 5 views for the user to read it, up to 10 views before it becomes memorable, and up to 20 views to turn into a conversion. Your effective frequency should also depend on the goals of your influencer marketing campaign.

If you want to slowly build brand awareness around a new company, it may not be helpful to have an excessively high number of impressions. But a time-sensitive promotion could benefit from higher impressions. 

To Increase Impressions

If you’d like to up your impressions, it’s pretty simple. Keep ‘em coming back for more. Create content that is relatable, cinematic, hilarious, out of the ordinary, or compelling. It could also range from important information to recipes to how-to guides to competitions.

This will encourage saves and bookmarks. Your content will be seen as valuable, engagement will increase, and you will see more conversions long term.

Expand Your Reach, and Make the Right Impressions

Reach and impressions are social media metrics that are indicators of the success or failure of your content. Knowing the reach count gives you an idea of how many people see your content, while impressions are how many times they’ve seen it. 

Your social media marketing strategy should be centered on expanding the reach of your content while making the right impressions. Make sure you are providing the best quality content that suits your target audience, as well as content that will keep them coming back. 

Now you’ve got a few more marketing terms under your belt! We hope this helps give you a little less palpable anxiety the next time you open your Google Analytics dashboard. Here at Tappie, we aim to make social media marketing worry-free!