DSMM_Reach vs Impressions

Reach refers to the total number of people who have seen your
ad or content. If 100 total people have seen your ad, that means
your ad’s reach is 100.

Impressions refer to the number of times your ad or content

has been displayed on a screen. Let’s say that your ad from the
previous example popped up on those people’s screens a total
of 300 times. That means the number of impressions for that
ad is 300.

Facebook reach vs. impressions

Facebook officially defines “reach” as: “the number of people
who saw your ads at least once.” It organizes reach into three
categories: organic, paid, and viral.

Organic reach refers to the number of unique people who saw

your content organically (for free) in the Facebook News Feed.

Paid reach is the number of people on Facebook who saw a piece

of content that has been paid for, like an ad. It’s often directly
affected by factors like ad bids, budgets and audience targeting.

Viral reach is the number of people who saw your content

because one of their friends interacted with it.

Reach on Facebook is different from impressions, which

Facebook defines as: “the number of times your ads were on
screen.” A unique user could see a post three times in their
feed throughout the duration of the campaign. That would
count as three impressions.cause one of their friends
interacted with it.

Facebook divides impressions into two categories: “served”

and “viewed.”

If an ad is “served,” that means simply that the ad has been paid

for and that the system has decided to deliver the ad somewhere
(to the top of a highly-visible news feed, an ad box in a sidebar,
etc.).

“Served” ads don’t need to appear on screen (they could

remain “below the fold,” as Facebook puts it) or even finish
rendering to count as a “served” impression.

“Viewed” impressions, on the other hand, don’t count unless the

user sees the ad appear on their screen. If the user doesn’t scroll to
see the ad, or navigates away from the page before it loads, then
the ad does not count as “viewed.”

Twitter reach vs. impressions

Twitter doesn’t track “reach,” so the reach vs. impressions question
is a little bit more straightforward. Twitter defines an
“impression” as any time a Twitter user sees one of your
tweets—either in their feed, search results, or as part of a
conversation.

Let’s say you have 1,000 followers and every single one of them
sees your latest tweet (or ad). That means that tweet received
1,000 impressions. Now let’s say you reply to that tweet with
another tweet. Your followers see the original tweet again, along
with your reply. That will result in an additional 2,000 impressions,
for a total of 3,000 total impressions.
Why focus on impressions?
You might track impressions if you’re worried about
overwhelming users with too many 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 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.

Why track both impressions and reach?

To figure out your ‘effective frequency’

We divide total impressions by total reach to get the average
number of impressions per user. (People call this “ad frequency,”
“frequency,” or “average impressions per user” interchangeably.)

So how many average impressions per user is good?

Most research around brand awareness suggests that users have

to have seen an ad at least several times before they begin to
become aware of the brand. Advertisers refer to this as the
“effective frequency”—the number of times someone sees an ad
before they respond to it.

To prevent ‘ad fatigue’

Figuring out your ‘effective frequency’ is also important because it
tells you how many times users can see your ad before they get
annoyed.