Reach vs Impressions: What’s the Difference?
Reach vs. Impressions
To understand the main difference between reach vs impressions, think about how you scroll through your social media news feed every day.
Your social media news feed displays hundreds of articles, photos, and videos. But you only click on a few of them that you find interesting.
That’s where reach vs impression comes in.
The social media content that you look at counts as reach. In simple terms, reach is the number of users who choose to see a brand’s content.
Reach focuses on getting people to click on your social media content.
On the other hand, impressions refers to the total number of times when users were exposed to your digital content on social media.
Why focus on impressions?
You might track impressions if you’re worried about overwhelming users with too many digital ads. If you want to avoid this, you might want to focus on increasing reach, rather than impressions.
Impressions also come in handy when you want to track your ads on a moment-to-moment basis. If you deploy an ad and it immediately gets few to no impressions, that could be an early sign that there’s something wrong with its framing or content.
Why focus on reach?
Reach can also help you figure out whether there’s something wrong with your ads. If your ads have reached a lot of people but you haven’t had a single conversion, for example, that might mean you have to revise the framing or marketing content of the ad.
If your content has broad reach, on the other hand, that means it’s successfully making its way to many new users, which means that it’s more likely to be shared and engaged with.
Tips to help you improve your reach and impressions:
Get to know your audience
If you really want to improve your reach and impressions, you need to get to know your audience better. Your audience drives your campaign results, so if you don’t like the results, focus on how to improve the experience for your audience.
First, create your campaign message with your audience in mind. What will appeal to them? Think about how your audience consumes content and what kind of marketing content interests them.
Monitor engagement
When you want to improve your reach and impressions, monitor engagement. Your engagement will give insight regarding the way your audience interacts with your brand. This is where you can monitor your current reach and impressions.
Impressions tell you a lot about how your audience interacts with your content. If you have a lot of impressions, this means your audience is sharing your content. Your content is appearing in more users’ feeds, which creates the opportunity for new leads to find your business.
Create shareable content
Content marketing is one method where you can measure reach and impressions. You can also share your content on social media and measure the same metrics there. If you want to create an effective campaign on both ends, create shareable content.
It’s important to create content that is interesting and exciting. Your content should attract your audience to read it and compel them to share it with others. You need to give your audience a reason to share it.