Impressions

Reach vs Impressions: What You Need To Know

As a data-driven marketing agency, we use artificial intelligence to track your content and its engagement in real time, on all platforms. This allows us to create the most interactive content for your audience. How do we know that this method works? The answer is the analytics don’t lie.

Analytics can be a confusing and overwhelming world to understand; and for that reason, StrategyNest takes that out of your hands. With that being said, we often present some of our analytic findings to our clients to help them learn more about their audience, why we create the certain content that we do, to show them the value our marketing efforts have, and more. During these presentations, you will often hear terms like CTR, conversions, impressions, keywords, organic traffic, reach, or SEO. Basically, there is a lot of jargon to remember and understand! We’re here to help you through it.

There are a few common confusions that we see on a regular basis, however. One of those includes the question, “What is the difference between reach and impressions?” Let’s go through it.

Reach is simply the total number of people who see your content.

Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed, no matter if it was clicked or not.

Basically, reach is the number of unique viewers who see your content – not your number of followers because not all of your followers view each post.

An impression is when your content has been delivered to someone’s feed. The viewer does not have to engage with your content in order for it to count. This means that one person could add multiple impressions for one single post. A perfect example would be if you saw a post on your feed. Then, an hour later, you come back to see another friend has reshared that same post you saw before. If you saw the post both time on your feed, that would count as two impressions for one post.

Unlike reach, impressions may be significantly larger than your number of followers.

Starting to make sense? Good!

Let’s say you make a post on Facebook to your 100 followers. If all of your 100 followers see that post, both your reach and your impressions would be 100. If tomorrow you posted twice to your same followers, your reach would still be 100, but your impressions would double to 200 because your 100 followers saw both of your tweets.

This is important to remember in terms of engagement and for tracking the success of your marketing social media marketing efforts.

For more on specifics on reach and impressions for particular platforms, how to incorporate them into your marketing strategy, how to monitor them yourself, and much more, contact StrategyNest today.

Are there other digital marketing questions you have for you or your business? Comment your questions below or reach out on our “contact” page.