Reach or Impressions – Which Should Your Business Be More Concerned With?

Every team analyzes the effectiveness of social media promotion through the lens of key metrics. Such a process requires a deep understanding of each indicator and its context. Although the list varies from company to company, in general reach and impression rates are standard metrics that every team pays attention to.

In the social media world, there are two critical metrics 99% of teams track but often misunderstand: reach and impressions. Usually, the metrics are grouped together, but each has its own definition and makes a significant impact on your social media strategy.

So, understanding the basics, or in this case, the difference between reach and impressions is a good starting point towards assessing your campaign success and optimizing your social media strategy.

What Are The Differences Between Reach & Impressions?

To put it simply, reach shows the number of unique users that were exposed to your content, while impressions show the number of times your content was displayed to these users.

In an ideal scenario, all of your followers would see and click on each of your posts.

But that’s not the case.

Social media platforms use complex algorithms to determine which content to show to which users, and as a result, only a fraction of your following is made aware of your activity every time you publish something.

In fact, this fraction is quite small – especially after the algorithm changes and the much talked about decline of organic reach across leading social media platforms in the course of the last couple of years.

Lower overall reach means fewer people seeing your posts, which ultimately leads to a drop in engagement and fewer conversations with potential customers (we’ll talk more about the impact of reach below).

Thankfully, ‘reach’ is not limited to your followers.

In other words, when a follower engages with your content, this activity will also show up on some of their friends’ feeds or explore page.

So, it is not uncommon to see that from the people reached, some percentage are not your followers (say 20% or 30%, or sometimes even 60%).

Now, impressions – they’re always higher than reach, as one person can have multiple impressions for a single piece of content.

Let’s say that five unique users saw your post and that each one of them saw it twice.

That means your reach will be 5, and the impressions 10.

If you are ever confused about these concepts, just remember that reach is related to users, while impressions show the frequency (times the content was shown).

What’s More Important For You?

Now that we’ve covered the definitions and examples for reach vs impressions, you’ve got a grip of the basic concepts.

Let’s dig in deeper now.

When it comes to reach vs impressions, which metric is more important for your social media marketing strategy?

It’s an important question.

But there is no straight answer to it. It all boils down to what your marketing goals are.

Both reach and impressions are important metrics you should track to measure your performance on social media. We can’t choose one over another. Both reach and impressions essentially measure social media engagement.

The reach metric is useful for evaluating the quality of a targeted ad. If the reach is high, but there are no conversions, this is a sign to check the structure and quality of the ad. On the other hand, impressions can give you a hint on how users are responding to your ad. If the response is cold, maybe you should change the target audience or purpose of the ad.

So, I guess we’re answering your question with a question: What are you marketing goals?