Let’s say you’ve just launched an advertising campaign or posted some content, and you want to see how it’s progressing. When you open your analytics, you’ll notice that two terms stand out: “impression” and “reach.” You can see that reach and impression are two different things, but you don’t fully understand what the difference is.

What exactly is the difference between “reach” and “impression“? Which more to pay attention to? So, what do these terms mean for your marketing?

Reach and impression have different meanings for different platforms. What Facebook calls “impression” Twitter has called “reach“, for example. Essentially, they represent two concepts.

Reach refers to the total number of people who have seen your ad or post. If 100 people have seen your ad, it means that the reach is 100.

Impression refers to the number of times your advertisement or post is displayed on a screen (computer, phone or any device that accesses the Internet). Let’s say that your advertisement from the previous example popped up on the screen 300 times. This means that the number of impressions is – 300.

Let’s take a look at how the major platforms define these 2 terms, to understand how each metric works.

Facebook’s definition of reach as: The number of people who have seen your ad at least once. Reach is the total number of unique users who have seen your post/ad.

Reach is divided into three categories: Branch, Paid, and Viral.

Organic reach refers to the number of unique people who have seen your post organically (for free) on the Facebook News Feed.

Paid Reach This is the number of people on Facebook who have seen a post that has been paid for. It is often directly influenced by various factors such as ad bid, budget, and target audience.

Viral reach is the number of people who have seen your post because one of their friends has interacted with it.

On the other hand, Facebook is defined by like: “how many times has your commercial been on the screens”. For example, if the same user sees your post three times on their wall, it would count as three impressions.

Neither reach nor impressions indicate that someone has clicked on your ad or interacted with it in any way.

Facebook also says that it is not mandatory for a video to start in order for an impression to be counted. In other words, an impression measures how many times your post has been seen.

So, how do we know if reach or impression is really real? To answer this question, Facebook shares impressions in There are two categories: ”served” and ”viewed”.

Instagram It treats reach and impression in the same way as Facebook. Reach refers to the total number of unique accounts that have seen your post or story on a given day. As you can see, reach is very important when it comes to brand awareness.

Impression represents the total number of times your post and story have been shown to a user. As with Facebook, every impression counts as an impression to the user. (So three times the same post will be counted as three impressions.) These are the two basic metrics that you want to track when evaluating the success of your Instagram strategy.

Reach and impressions refer to two specific activities, so deciding which metric will be more important depends on what your goals are. Let’s start with why you should focus on impressions.

You can track impressions if you want to avoid overloading users with ads, which can lead to a counter effect. No one likes to be bothered. If you want to avoid this, it may be better to focus on reach rather than impressions.

Impressions are also useful when we want to follow advertisements in the moment-to-moment the basics. If you run your ad and immediately get little or no impressions, it can be a sign that something is wrong with the post.

Reach can also help you see if there’s something wrong with your ad. If your ad reached a lot of people, but you didn’t get any conversions, it may mean that you should reconsider the content of your ad.

If, on the other hand, your content has a large reach, it means that it is successful and that it finds its way to many new users, which means that it is more likely to be shared and interacted.

Reach and impression say different things about the performance of ads and content. More often than not, you’ll need to use both metrics together to discover the effectiveness of a campaign or advertisement.

Comparing impressions and reach is deceptive, because impressions will always be equal to or greater than reach. Any user who is in your reach number (eng. Reach will see your content at least once, and many will see it several times. How many times?

To find out, we divide the total number of impressions by the total number of impressions to get the average number of impressions per user. (Some call this ”ad frequency”, or ”average impressions per user”).

So, how much of an average impression per user is good?

A lot of brand awareness research suggests that users need to see an ad several times before they can start gaining brand awareness. Advertisers call this “effective frequency” – the number of times someone has seen an ad before reacting to it.

According to General Electric’s Herbert E. Krugman, three exposures to an advertisement are enough to make someone aware of your brand. As early as 1885, London businessman Thomas Smith stated that it was necessary to twenty.

By all accounts, the effective frequency of your business will be closely related to your industry and product. If you want to get a sense of how many impressions are reasonable, try to get some insight into how much your competition is targeting.

Revealing the effective frequency is also important because it tells us how many times users see an ad before it starts to annoy them.

How many impressions per user are will depend on your social media goals. If you want to slowly build brand awareness, a provocative campaign, which cannot be ignored, may not be the best way to go.

But if you have a time-sensitive promotion and want as many people as possible to see you, a large number of impressions per user could be a good goal.

Reach and impression can tell you a lot about what kind of results your content is getting. But it’s important to remember that they don’t tell you anything about whether someone actually clicked on or interacted with your content.

If you want to measure your ROI on social media, and you’re focused on short- and medium-term ROI, focusing on conversion is key. At the end of the day, website traffic, generated leads, email list sign-ups, conversions, and revenue are much more concrete measures of campaign success.

If you want to draw a line between advertising cost and ROI, pair the reach and impression metrics with conversion and revenue. Make sure you combine reach with much more specific actions, such as signups and revenue.

One way is to divide the revenue by the total users we have reached to get the “average revenue per reached user”.

This can help you better understand how advertising costs and your efforts to increase reach result in a concrete return on investment (ROI).