Impressions vs. Reach: What's the deal?

There are a lot of web and social media metrics out there that can tell you about the scope your post or page commanded. Impressions and reach are two of the biggest metrics used to measure how far your post went and how many people saw or were impacted by it. Many marketers use impressions and reach as interchangeable terms, however, that is not the case. Though they measure very similar metrics, the two terms give you slightly different information.

Impressions, simply put, are the number of times your post, ad, etc., is displayed. Reach is defined as the number of people who saw that post.  It may seem like a small detail, but the difference between these two metrics is monumental. If your page or post has 2,000 impressions but a reach of 500, it means that 500 people were shown the same content four times. Here’s why this matters to you.

Many people put more weight in the reach of a post than the impressions but they don’t mean that reach is a better metric. In fact, impressions can be more telling especially if your campaign uses remarketing.  “[Remarketing] allows you to position targeted ads in front of a defined audience that had preciously visited your website-as they browse elsewhere around the internet." In this case you hope for a high number of impressions as people are “followed around” by your brand.

A high number of impressions can also tell you which of your pages or blog posts are the most popular or useful. If people keep coming back to your same page, it must mean that they find something on there interesting or helpful for their work or lives. This is a great way to tell what type of content works and which doesn’t. It could also be a sign that this post is somehow the starting off point for clients like your homepage or a landing page they may have bookmarked.

Another element to examine is how impressions line up with engagement. Impressions are best used in relation to other metrics. For instance, if you create a post that has a high number of impressions, but little engagement, it may not be quality material. Impressions are used to help calculate the engagement rate (impressions/engagement). Post and pages with a low engagement rate are offering little value to those they reached. This is a good sign that the content is getting out into the world, but there is nothing, such as a call to action or question, encouraging viewers to engage with the post or page.

The goal of most campaigns is to keep impressions up. Looking at your website and social metrics for an extended period of time can tell you which months were your best. If you had a large dip in impressions this month, it would behoove you to look and see why. Are you posting less? Was your content shared less? Was your site down for maintenance? Consider impressions as the barometer of metrics. It is the first sign that changes you made have had an impact, either positively or negatively.