Reach vs. Impressions: What's the Difference and How to Understand These Metrics

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Within all the aspects inherent to social networks, the topic of metrics is one of the most important factors for brands because it allows them to understand the impact of their digital strategies.

With this in mind, the battle that has emerged from the study of these indicators has been the popular reach vs. impressions, which are, for many, the same thing.

For this reason, we have decided to create special content dentist database that can define both concepts, talk specifically about the characteristics and uses of each one and, of course, exemplify their importance within Digital Marketing strategies .

Would you like to learn more about the relationship and differences between reach vs impressions? Read until the end!

What is scope, for sure?
When we talk about reach within a social platform, such as Instagram , Facebook, Twitter or even LinkedIn, we are specifically referring to the number of users who have been effectively impacted by a post within the interface.

That is, every time you enter the feed of your favorite social network and see content from your friends, from the brands you follow, or even from organizations that decide to run Ads campaigns, it is called reach.

However, it does not matter if the same user sees a post more than once, for the platform's metrics, it is only counted as one.

Generally, content published on a social network manages to generate more impressions in quantity than the total number of followers of the profile that uploads it.

For example, on Instagram this metric is often one of the bases of campaigns since it allows us to understand how many people were potentially impacted.

This app also has a section called "Explore" where users can find new creators and brands to follow, and where they also receive views that the profile does not necessarily know about before.

Something that is important to clarify is that reach has two types: organic and paid.

Organic reach
It refers to the impacts achieved by an account or profile without using Ads campaigns . That is, it is content that reaches the user through natural means, either by recommendation of the algorithm or through another user who suggests viewing the content.

Organic reach can be generated through two sources: viral reach gained through sharing and non-viral reach gained through channels without any human intervention.

Paid Scope
Paid reach is, of course, the other side of the coin in this story: it is a reach achieved through the use of advertising tools such as Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads, by running ad campaigns.

And now, what are impressions?
To understand the general context of the classic social media battle , reach vs. impressions, we must know the other "competitor."

Impressions are a metric that tells us how many times content is displayed on users' screens. In short, it is a "screen impression" of a post from an account.

This is precisely where confusion about reach vs. impressions arises, since reach tells us the number of users who actually see a post.

On the other hand, impressions are the number of times the content is displayed on the screen, but this does not mean that the user has detailed it, much less interacted with it.

So we can say that an impression is, simply, a view that can be repeated for the same publication through the same user.

For example, if you see a post on Instagram in the "Explore" section, but then a friend shares that same material with you, it will count as two impressions.

Now, on platforms like Facebook or Instagram, impressions can also be of different types such as:

Organic : The number of times non-promoted content is shown to network users.
Payments : number of times that paid or promoted content is shown as an advertisement to users.
Viral : Like reach, viral impressions are those produced through interactions between platform users.
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But then, aren't paid impressions the same as paid reach?

Here it is necessary to be very careful not to confuse both concepts, since when an advertisement is shown, an impression will be produced when the ad is displayed on the screen but it does not take into account whether the user has seen it.

What does this mean?

Well, impressions count ads, on many platforms, that can appear to the user behind a window and when the person leaves the site.

For this reason, it is important to analyze this metric very carefully and find the "viewed impressions" that count those that are displayed in the foreground on the device.

Importance of these metrics in social networks
Why is it so important to measure reach or impressions? This is the question that many people ask themselves.

One of the main objectives of using platforms like these is to create an audience or a community around a person, a brand or a company.

In this sense, the scope will provide a clear perspective of the results obtained and whether the strategies are yielding positive results.

In short, they will allow you to understand data about the engagement generated by people who follow or discover the account and also the number of eyes that have been impacted by the publications.

Impressions also make it easier to understand the influence generated by the brand on social networks .

For example, a post published on Instagram with many impressions is a clear sign that it was accepted by users and resonated with the audience.

Differences between both with examples
As we know that you may not be entirely clear on these concepts yet, we will differentiate them using practical examples on social networks that you can more easily "land" in your head.

Facebook and Instagram
Imagine that within your company account on Instagram or Facebook fan page you have made a post addressed to the 1,000 followers you have.

If 200 of them see the post twice, that means you've gotten 400 impressions, right? The number of times the post is shown, multiplied by the number of unique people who see it.

Now, if we're talking about reach, that means you only reached 200 people. That's the number of unique users who saw a post.

When we bring this to ads, it works similarly: as long as the ad is shown once to a user it will count as one (1) impression, which can be very misleading for Digital Marketing newbies, especially if it is displayed after a lead or when they leave the site.

However, the scope will only record those impacts where the user has the post in the foreground and the system "believes" that he has already observed it.

Twitter
On Twitter, the issue of reach vs. impressions is different than the rest.

The app is unable to measure the reach of tweets, as it is virtually impossible for the algorithm to tell whether a tweet was seen or just made an irrelevant impression.

For this reason, the network managers decided that impressions will only be measured when the tweet appears on the screen, as long as it is in the news section or the feed and in the search results.

That is, if you publish a tweet and it is seen by 200 users, 3 times on average each, it means it will have 600 impressions.

Importance of both for a social media marketing strategy
Now, despite being two similar metrics but with few contrasts between them, this does not mean that they cannot go well together.

Depending on your campaign objectives, the decision between reach vs. impressions depends on the result you want to measure.

For example, if you are thinking of running an Ads campaign on Instagram or Facebook, you will generally be interested in knowing the impressions, since this will indicate whether the segmentation carried out is the most appropriate.

On the other hand, if you are looking to boost brand awareness and promote your brand, reach will be a more accurate metric for your goals.

However, using reach and impressions will give you a great insight into your engagement , as it measures the interactions your account has with users and the attention it is receiving.

Do you now see a difference between these two metrics? We hope that after understanding the differences and similarities between reach vs. impressions, you have understood the importance of each in digital strategies.

So we are sure that when you get here you will be eager to continue discovering more about this world, right?