Reach vs Impressions:

Why You Need to Know the Difference

Regardless of the type of business you run, digital marketing can be highly effective when it comes to reaching out to your target market. Never before was it so easy to precisely target an audience without burning a hole in your wallet. However, the fact is, true digital marketing success only comes to those who regularly analyze their analytics. And learn from their own performance.

In order to see how well you are reaching your digital marketing goals, it’s crucial to focus on the right metrics from the beginning. That’s the only way you’d be able to improve your efforts and get a higher return on your investment in the long run.

When leveraging digital marketing, two critical metrics to monitor and understand are:  “Reach” vs “Impressions”.

Every digital marketer has read into these two crucial metrics (Reach vs Impressions) at some point in time. But not all of them put in the effort to truly understand what they mean. Also, it’s easy to confuse Reach with Impressions and vice versa. However, these terms have their own definitions, and they differ in a major way.

Each of these metrics is important in its own right. Unless and until you spend time analyzing them, you will fail to get the most out of your digital marketing campaign. 

Even if you do acknowledge the importance of digital engagement and how it can impact the overall success of your campaign, you still need a firm strategy to succeed. You can only have a proper strategy in place when you properly measure these important metrics and see what you can do to improve your efforts.

Here’s why it’s crucial to know the real difference between Reach vs Impressions:

Difference Between Reach and Impressions

Brand Awareness – If your reach increase, it would definitely also increase awareness. An impression’s reach is important to every brand. They have to reach as many users as possible. But keep in mind that even if a post reaches 5,000 users, it will be pointless if only a quarter of them are truly interested in what you offer.

So if you’re using popular social media channels (such as Facebook and Twitter) to build brand awareness, then you need to know how Reach differs from Impressions. Or else you will end up investing your time and effort in the wrong direction. Which may hurt your brand image rather than improving it in the eyes of your target audience.

Audience Growth – Growing your digital audience allows you to reach out to new people and expose them to your brand and products. Knowing the key difference between Reach vs Impressions and understanding these metrics will help you create the right kind of content. Content that attracts more fans and followers. Who in turn share more of your content, leading to higher growth.

Audience Influence – What’s the use of building an audience if you’re not influencing them and consistently growing your authority? Knowing your Reach as well as your Impressions allows you to build and nurture strong relationships with your existing fans and followers.

Before you can start measuring Reach vs Impressions, you first need to learn more about these two metrics, and get more clarity on how they work.

Reach vs Impressions:

Reach denotes the total number of users who actually got to view your content. Contrary to popular belief, your content does not reach all of your digital followers/fans — even if you’re a big company like Pepsi or Starbucks with millions of followers.

Since you spend so much time building your follower base, it’s only natural to want all of them to see your content. But the truth is, only a small percentage of them (about 10% or less) end up seeing it each time you post. This is partly due to algorithms and partly because of your posting time and frequency. 

Learn More About Reach Vs Impressions:

Have Questions About Reach vs Impressions?

If you have a question about how this works and want to learn more about it, reach out and let us know. We’re here to help you succeed!