Facebook remains a dominant force in the digital marketing landscape, with over 2.9 billion monthly…
Let’s say you’ve just launched an ad campaign or published some content, and you want to see how it’s doing. When you open your analytics, you will notice that two terms stand out: ” impression ” and ” reach “. You see that reach and impression are two different things, but you don’t fully understand the difference.
What exactly is the difference between ” reach ” and ” impression “? Which one should you pay more attention to? And what do these terms mean for your marketing?
The difference between the terms reach and impression
Reach and impression have different meanings for different platforms. What Facebook calls ” impression ” Twitter calls ” reach ” for example. But essentially, they denote two concepts.
Reach refers to the total number of people who saw your advertisement or post. If 100 people saw your ad, that means the reach is 100.
Impression refers to the number of times your advertisement or announcement is displayed on a screen (computer, phone or any device that accesses the Internet). Let’s say that your ad from the previous example was displayed 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 reach vs impressions
Facebook defines reach as: The number of people who saw your ad at least once. According to this definition, reach measures the total number of unique users who saw your post/advertisement.
Reach is divided into 3 categories: affiliate, paid and viral.
Organic reach refers to the number of unique people who saw your post organically (for free) on the Facebook News Feed .
Paid reach is the number of people on Facebook who saw a post that was 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 saw your post because one of their friends interacted with it.
Impression, on the other hand , is defined by Facebook like: “how many times your ad was on the screens”. If the same user, for example, sees your post three times on his wall, that would be counted as three impressions.
Neither ” reach ” nor ” impressions ” mean that someone clicked on your ad or interacted with it in any way.
Facebook also says that it is not necessary for a video to start for an impression to count. In other words, an impression measures how many times your post has been seen.
So how do we know if a reach or an impression is real? To answer this question, Facebook shares impressions in two categories : “served” and “viewed”.
When an ad is “served”, it means that the ad has simply been paid for and that the system has decided to deliver the ad somewhere (at the top of someone’s News Feed , in the ad box on the side, etc…)
“Served” ads don’t have to appear on the screen (they can stay “below the fold”, as Facebook calls it).
A “viewed” impression, on the other hand, is counted if the user sees the ad on the screen. If the user does not scroll to see the ad, or moves away from the page before it loads, then the ad is not counted as “viewed”.
Instagram reach vs impressions
Instagram treats reach and impression almost the same as Facebook . Reach refers to the total number of unique accounts that saw your post or story on a given day. As you can already conclude, reach is very important when it comes to brand awareness .
Impression represents the total number of times your post and story were displayed to a user. As with Facebook , here every view to the user counts as an impression. (Thus, a post shown three times to the same user will be counted as three impressions). So these are the two basic metrics you want to track when evaluating the success of your Instagram strategy.
What is the best track?
Reach and impressions refer to two separate activities, so deciding which metric is more important depends on what your goals are. Let’s start with why you should focus on impressions.
Why focus on impressions?
You can track impressions if you want to avoid overwhelming users with advertisements, which can have the opposite effect. Nobody likes to be bored! If you want to avoid that, it might be better to focus on reach rather than impressions.
Impressions are also useful when we want to track advertisements moment-to-moment basics. If you run your ad and immediately get few or no impressions, it could be a sign that something is wrong with the post.
Why focus on reach?
Reach can also help us see if something is wrong with the advertisement. If your ad has reached a lot of people, but you haven’t had any conversions, it may mean that you should reconsider your ad content.
If your content, on the other hand, has a large reach, it means that it is successful and finding its way to many new users, which means that it will most likely be shared and interacted with.
Why monitor both reach and impression?
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 ad.
Understand Your “Effective Frequency”
Comparing impressions and reach is misleading, because impressions will always be equal to or greater than reach. Every user in your reach will see your content at least once, and many will see it several times. How many times?
To figure this out, we divide the total number of impressions by the total number of reaches to get the average number of impressions per user. (Some call it “ad frequency”, or “average impressions per user”).
So how many average impressions per user is good?
Much research on brand awareness suggests that consumers need to see an ad several times before they begin to gain brand awareness. Advertisers call this “effective frequency” – how many times someone saw an ad before acting on it.
Herbert E. Krugman (General Electric’s) stated that three exposures to advertising are enough to make someone aware of your brand. As early as 1885, London businessman Thomas Smith stated that it was necessary 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 many your competition is targeting.
Don’t be fooled by advertisements
Discovering 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 is too many will depend on your social media goals. If you want to slowly build brand awareness, a provocative campaign that cannot be ignored may not be the best way to go.
But if you have a time-sensitive promotion and want to be seen by as many people as possible, a high number of impressions per user might be a good goal.
What to monitor besides reach and impressions?
Reach and impression can tell you a lot about how your content is performing. But it’s important to remember that they don’t tell you anything about whether someone actually clicked 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, site traffic, leads generated, email sign-ups, conversions and revenue are much more concrete measures of campaign success.
If you want to draw a line between ad spend and ROI, pair 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 number of users reached to get “average revenue per user reached”.
This can help you better understand how your advertising spend and your efforts to increase reach result in a concrete return on investment (ROI).
For more useful and educational articles on digital marketing – visit our blog.
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Made by Nemanja Nedeljkovic – Senior Account Manager @Digitizer