Are you trying to increase your visibility and influence on social media? To achieve success in your social media campaign you must know about the two most important metrics – Reach and Impression.
Sometimes, you may need to give preference to one over the other. Given that they are closely linked, it can be difficult to make a choice. While they are often grouped, both of these metrics have their definitions and they make a major impact on your engagement and visibility.
Before you develop your social media strategy, you need to learn about the difference between reach and impressions.
To understand the difference between reach and impression you need to think of yourself as a user, think about how you scroll through your Instagram or Facebook feed daily.
Your 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 and impression come in.
Reach means the total number of people who choose to interact with your brand content. Reach focuses on getting people to click on your content.
On the other side, an impression means the total number of times your content got featured in the user's feed. It does not mean that the people who are watching your content are interacting with it.
If you run an ad and it was displayed 1000 times on Facebook this means you have a 1000 impressions. Out of those 1000, only 200 people choose to click on your link which means the reach of your ad is 200.
Not all of your followers will always click on your post, therefore; your reach will always be lesser than your impressions.
Now that you know the basics of reach and impressions, you are ready to move ahead. It's time to understand which are more important metrics to look for while creating a social media strategy.
It's an important question but there is no straight answer. It all boils down to what your marketing goals are.
You should focus on impressions if you want to continually track your ads. Impressions provide you with a moment-to-moment update. This metric can help you gauge how users are responding to your ad.
If the response you receive is cold, you should consider repurposing your content or changing the target audience.
Similarly, reach shows the number of people who engage with your content. If they aren't-converting into customers or going to the next stage of the sales funnel, you need to reconsider your strategy.
Both reach and impressions are very important to know whether you are on the right track or not as both of them represent engagement.
To enhance or boost your engagement, it is crucial to monitor the reach and impression of your content. Initially, it might be confusing for you but both metrics are extremely important to boost your brand engagement.
Comparing reach and impressions is a tricky thing. Every time your impressions will be higher or equal to your reach and every user who is counted as a "reach" will have been exposed to your content at least once.
So, how can you find the exact number of times your content has been seen? To get this number, you can divide your total reach by the average number of impressions you get for each user. This is known as ad frequency or average impression peruser.
Most marketers believe that a user needs to see an ad several times before they become aware of the brand and the product. In marketing terms, it's called effective frequency. It refers to the total number of times people see an ad before responding to it.
While there is no fixed number, the effective frequency differs from industry to industry. The best way to find out your right frequency number, you should follow what your competitor's effective frequency is.
Every marketer a beginner or a pro has come across with reach and impressions. Both the terms are grouped, so it's difficult to put them in separate boxes. But only a pro marketer can understand that both of them measure different elements in analytics.
Yes, both metrics are important to develop and execute a social media strategy and which metrics you give importance to completely depends on your marketing goals.