Reach: Useful, But Not the Most Useful

When it comes to marketing, reach (not to be confused with impressions) is often one of the first metrics that gets attention. After all, it shows how many unique individuals have seen your content, which makes it an important indicator of exposure. But is reach the most important metric? Let’s get into it.

What is Reach and What Does It Measure?

Reach isn’t necessarily the most important metric. While it’s helpful, reach should be seen as a complementary metric, rather than the main measure of success for your campaign.

Simply put, reach refers to the total number of unique users who see a particular piece of content. It’s often confused with impressions, which count how many times your content is displayed, regardless of whether the same person sees it multiple times. Reach, on the other hand, only counts each person once, no matter how many times they come across your content.

While reach can give you a snapshot of your campaign’s visibility, it doesn’t tell you anything about engagement or conversion, which are what you’re really after.

Simple example: It’s like knowing how many people entered a store, but not knowing if any of them made a purchase.

Second example: Let’s say you’re running a sign-up campaign. Reach will help you understand how many people saw your message, but the real success metric here is how many people actually signed up. If your reach is high but sign-ups are low, it might suggest that the content is being shown to the right number of people, but the message isn’t compelling enough, or it lacks a clear call-to-action.

Why Should You Care About Reach?

Even though it’s not the most important metric, reach plays a key role in helping you assess campaign performance. It provides context and insight into how widely your content is spreading, and if your content is being shown to enough people. It’s especially helpful in the following areas:

1. Brand Awareness
   If you’re introducing a new product, service, or campaign, reach helps you understand how many people are becoming aware of your brand. Without reach, you can’t measure exposure, and without exposure, you won’t drive awareness.

2. Campaign Evaluation
   Reach helps you evaluate whether your content is reaching your target audience.But that’s only one part of the equation. You also need to track other metrics like CTR (Click-through Rate)

3. Growth Indicators
   Tracking reach over time can help you understand whether your audience is growing, staying steady, or shrinking. But again, growth in reach alone doesn’t guarantee meaningful growth—quality engagement is what really drives success.

How to Improve Your Marketing Reach

While reach is useful for measuring exposure, improving your reach requires a more strategic approach:

1. Audience Segmentation
   You can increase reach without just blasting your message to everyone, by refining your audience segmentation—ensuring you’re reaching the people most likely to engage. After all, if you’re selling Yankees merchandise, you wouldn’t want to spend all your energy advertising to Dodgers fans.

2. Content Optimization
   If your reach is high but engagement is low, you may need to rethink your content. It could be that your message is reaching many people, but it’s not compelling enough to make them take the next step. 

3. Omnichannel Strategy
   An omnichannel approach can help you expand your reach by distributing your content across various platforms (social media, email, blogs, etc.). Monitoring reach across these different channels will give you a fuller picture of how your content is performing.

Bonus info:

Reach and Impressions: The Power of Both

While reach tells you how many unique individuals saw your content, impressions tell you how many times it was displayed. A person can see the same ad or post multiple times, so impressions can be higher than reach. Together, reach and impressions give you a better understanding of both how many people were exposed to your content and how often they were exposed to it.

For example, if one person sees your ad twice in a day, your impressions will be 2, but your reach will still be 1. This is important because high impressions without high reach could mean you’re showing the same content to the same people repeatedly, which might not lead to new conversions or engagement.

In conclusion…

While reach provides valuable insights into your campaign’s visibility, it’s not the most critical metric. Use it as a complementary metric alongside other KPIs like engagement, conversions, and CTR. To get a more complete picture of your marketing and its performance check all of our blogs. Bluumly’s got you!