Reach – total number of people who have seen your content.
This metric is often confused with another important marketing metric – Impressions.
Reach vs Impression
Reach indicates an approximate estimation of how many unique users have seen your content, while Impressions is the metric that shows an approximate estimation of how often in total your content was loaded, potentially to the same person twice.
It is important to understand, that on different platforms the definition of Reach can vary.
Let us have a look at some examples.
Reach on Facebook & Instagram
Reach – number of individuals who saw your content at least once.
Reach on LinkedIn
On LinkedIn, instead of reach there are two metrics – impressions and uniques – that indicate the same as Reach on other platforms. Impressions indicate how many times the content was seen in total. While uniques show how many unique users have seen the content.
Reach on Twitter
Twitter defines two types of Reach: potential and actual.
Potential Reach – how many unique users your content potentially could have reached if it would reach all the people in your target audience.
Actual Reach – the number of unique individuals who have actually seen your post.
Reach in Google Ads
Google Ads defines two types of Reach: Unique Reach and Cookie-based Reach.
Unique Reach – total number of individuals who were shown the ad.
Cookie-based Reach – an estimate of how often the content was shown. More information here.
Reasons to track Reach
Tracking Reach can help you to understand how relevant and attractive your content is for your target audience and how many actual individuals you reached. The main goal of every marketer is to increase reach and engagement with the content.
How can tracking Reach help you to become more data-driven?
By tracking Reach you can understand how effective your marketing campaign is. With nexoya, you can easily compare the effectiveness of each marketing campaign by cross-referencing the reach which for instance each ad achieved. You can detect what type of content was performing better and had a broader reach.
The broader reach you have the higher the chances of conversion.
Make sure you also track the number of conversions or engagement with the content. You can easily visualize the dynamic in these metrics in nexoya by using the Marketing funnel.
If you notice that your reach is high while the number of conversions is really low – that can signify that your ad is not effective enough. In order to improve it try to modify creatives, the ad content itself, or your targeting.
Additionally, on some platforms reach is used for the calculation of the engagement/interaction rates. These metrics help you to see the connection between the number of people reached and how many actually interacted with your content.
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Additional information about Reach
- How to Understand and Maximize Your Reach on Any Social Network
- Reach vs. Impressions: What’s the Difference (And What Should You Track)?:
- 20 Secrets That’ll Boost Your Facebook Organic Reach