Impressions vs Reach: Facts That You Need To Know

Businesses are unquestionably working to achieve extraordinary lengths of brand awareness, growth, and influence. At present, the best way to do this is by utilizing social media. With social media’s power and influence, brands could get the awareness that they need in a much quicker manner. However, social media marketing isn’t as easy as how people perceive it to be. And one of the most critical social media analytics are impressions vs reach. 

For those who yearn to deep dive into and leverage social media marketing, it’s crucial to monitor and understand the differences between impressions and reach. Without a good knowledge of these two metrics, it wouldn’t be easy to move forward and be successful in any social media marketing venture. To help you out, we have come up with this detailed guide, which highlights the key differences between the two metrics.

What are Impressions?

Impressions indicate the number of times your content pops up on social media. If an advertisement is displayed 300 times on social media platforms, the number of impressions would also be 300. Most content that has a high number of impressions are sponsored ads or posts. 

Why are impressions higher than reach?

Most starting social media marketers often wonder why impressions tend to be higher than reach. Aren’t the two directly related to each other?

Impressions are higher than reach simply because impressions calculate the exposure, while reach calculates the number of interactions exclusively. However, others ask “can reach be higher than impressions.” The answer is a clear no. By definition, impressions are always equal to or higher than the reach since impressions don’t require interaction from the audience, as opposed to reach. 

Why are impressions important?

Impressions are important since they’re the metric being applied to public relations. If a brand wants to focus on constantly monitoring and tracking its ads, it should focus on impressions. Additionally, it could also gauge whether viewers are positively responding to the ad. 

On the question “are engagements are more important than impressions?” the short answer is no. They’re equally important since brand engagement increases as the impressions increase. This is because the number of potential respondents is also increasing. 

What’s the Difference Between Views and Impressions?

Another commonly interchanged terms are impressions vs views. What exactly is the main difference between views and impressions? Views are the total number of times an audience engages with a brand’s content, particularly video ads.  

Let’s look into how impressions work on two of the biggest social media platforms today—Facebook and Instagram. Here are the distinctions between the impressions on both platforms.

What are impressions on Facebook?

As defined by Facebook, impressions are the total number of instances that an ad appears on screen for the first time. Facebook impressions have three vital components:

• Organic Impressions. This pertains to the number of times a brand’s Facebook content was displayed on a follower’s newsfeed or the official page.
• Viral Impressions. This is the number of times an organic or paid content was shown to your Facebook friends’ friends.
• Paid Impressions. This component refers to the number of times a brand’s paid content or sponsored ad was shown to followers or other target users.

One impression on Facebook can be achieved when a user scrolls up when an ad is displayed, then scrolls down, and back up again. Facebook computes two impressions for one ad if it’s shown twice on the user’s screen. Displaying the ad twice is necessary to achieve two impressions, regardless if it appears on the same or different days. Facebook won’t count impressions that would occur without loading the page. 

You may have access to Facebook impressions if you’re an advertiser who runs ads or the owner of a page who boosts posts. Advertisers must determine how their paid campaigns perform and know whether their audiences see their ads. 

How beneficial are Facebook impressions?

On Facebook, impressions would help determine whether the audience sees the ad or if your advertisement gains the targeted conversions. Before acquiring a conversion, the target audience must first see your ads. However, expect that the graph would be curvy. Impressions could possibly rise and fall. A rise in impressions would indicate that a specific ad is optimized for both the platform and the audience.

In contrast, plunging impressions suggest that the desired audience isn’t seeing the ad. Once this happens, a good move would be to change the campaign’s objectives and targets, then check it once again to see an improvement in the performance. However, you must also be on the lookout for ad fatigue or when the audience would overlook or ignore the ad because they’ve seen it too many times. 

What are impressions on Instagram?

What does impression mean on Instagram? Is it similar to or different from Facebook? Instagram and Facebook are closely related to each other because the same people own them. Since Facebook owns Instagram, the method of calculation for Instagram impressions is similar to that of Facebook. Advertisements on both platforms would reflect on the same dashboard. However, Instagram allows access to organic stories and feed post impressions—something Facebook doesn’t do. 

How to view impressions on Instagram stories:

• On the bottom right corner of a story, you could find the “More” button. You have to click it.
• To access the analytics, click the graph icon, then move down to “Impressions.” 

The impressions metric on the Instagram stories is the total number of times the audience views a story. For example, if you view Amazon’s story, swipe next to a different account’s story, then go back to view Amazon’s story again, the system would calculate the impressions as equal to 2. Facebook’s page-load method of calculating impressions doesn’t apply to Instagram stories. 

How to view impressions of your Instagram feed posts:

• Tap on “View Insights.”
• Look for the Insights button.
• Scroll down to “Impressions.”

In running Instagram ads, or any other ads for that matter, make sure to continuously check on your advertisement’s performance and work on the perfect strategy to avoid mishaps and underperformance. 

What is Reach?

To further clarify the topic about impressions vs reach, let’s define what a reach is, how the system calculates it, and what it does to an ad. 

Any content on a social media platform that you’d click on purpose would count as reach. Reach comprises the number of users who purposely choose to check a brand’s ad or content. Reach primarily focuses on having people click on the content. As per Facebook, reach refers to the total number of people who have seen your ads at least once or more. 

What’s the difference between reach and engagement?

Some social media marketing novices would often get confused about reach vs engagement. While reach measures the number of people who have seen or opened the post, engagement, on the other hand, measures the interactions on the post. 

Engagement measures the number of views, comments, likes, shares, and clicks a post gets. Engagement metrics must be a point of consideration when building a relationship with your audience and customers. Measure their intent to take on action and increase their loyalty to your brand. 

As opposed to what others think, reach and engagement isn’t parallel to each other. A high reach doesn’t indicate high engagement. Achieving high engagement is possible, but with a lower reach or vice versa. 

How to calculate reach from impressions

In calculating reach, methods and mediums differ in difficulty. For example, a brand would release a range of Twitter posts to introduce a new product or line. Twitter allows for easy tracking of tweet impressions to assess the ROI efficiently. 

One basic and commonly used formula to calculate reach is the division of impressions by frequency. However, there are technology and tools available online for easier calculation of your reach. One example is Google Adwords. Using this tool will automatically show the number of reach of a particular banner ad. 

Moreover, it’s vital to remember that some non-social media campaigns would make it impossible to compute the market reach. One example is a billboard advertisement. It would be unthinkable to identify how many cars and motorcycles would drive by your billboard ad. 

Impact of Knowing the Difference Between Impression and Reach

Brand Awareness

Once reach increases, brand awareness does as well. A post must reach hundreds to thousands of users if possible. However, a brand must not forget that the number of reached audiences wouldn’t matter if they aren’t truly interested in the brand’s products or services. 

For those utilizing popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you have to know how impressions differ from reach. You wouldn’t want to end up investing so much of your time, money, and effort for nothing, or worse, in the wrong direction. Remember that you want to raise brand awareness and not the opposite.

Audience Increase

Increasing your social media audience would pave the way to reach out to potential customers and present your brand and products to them. Understanding how reach and impressions work and knowing their primary differences would allow you to know the right kind of content for your brand. 

The right content would bring fans and followers to your page. These fans and followers would then share your content with others. Thus, leading to a rapid increase in your audience size. Now, if you’re a big fan of Instagram, there are a number of ways to increase your Instagram reach. 

Audience Influence

Besides aiming to build an audience, every brand should strive to influence its target audience. There’s no use in building an audience without encouraging and influencing them to positive action. If you haven’t batted an eye yet, most brands today hold their stand on social, economic, and national issues with the aim of influencing the audience in mind.  

Knowing your brand’s reach and impressions would allow you to develop and strengthen the bond you have with your followers—the stronger the bond, the greater the influence.

Effective Ads

The moment you invest time, money, and effort in your social media marketing campaign, it’s natural to wonder whether your campaign is effective and delivers your desired results. Both reach and impressions can provide you insights into the campaign’s performance and effectiveness. 

If your ads are not reaching your target audience well but have gained a whopping number of impressions, you would get the idea that your campaign isn’t that successful. It would then give you a chance to rethink and redo your ads, making them more appealing and interesting to your audience.

So, which is more important: impressions or reach?

Impressions vs reach might look very similar on the exterior, particularly to social media marketers who are just starting. However, it would take critical thinking and effort to dive deeper and see how different these two metrics are. A poor and faulty understanding of these two metrics, and all the other metrics involved in social media marketing, would result in low ROI and a decrease in brand awareness. Thus, if you want to build your brand, start here.

Regardless of the type of business, social media marketing has long been proven effective, particularly in reaching out, gaining, and keeping customers and audiences. To see how well a brand is going towards reaching its social media marketing goals and objectives, focusing on the accurate metrics from the very start would make a drastic difference. 

To learn more about measuring your influencer marketing’s performance, read our extensive guide, “6 Key Influencer Marketing Metrics You Need to Start Tracking Today.”