The number of unique people who are exposed to a piece of content, campaign, or advertisement.
A measure of audience size rather than the total number of times content was displayed.
Short and sweet:
The number of unique people who are exposed to a piece of content, campaign, or advertisement.
A measure of audience size rather than the total number of times content was displayed.
See also: Impression, Frequency, Organic Reach
Reach counts the number of unique individuals exposed to a piece of content or an ad at least once, regardless of how many times each person actually saw it, which distinguishes it from impressions, a volume metric that counts every view including repeats from the same person. A campaign can rack up a large number of impressions from a fairly small, frequently exposed audience, so reach gives a clearer sense of how broadly a message actually traveled. Because expanding reach often means spending more or targeting more broadly, it’s usually weighed against frequency and relevance rather than pursued as a goal entirely on its own.
A Super Bowl commercial can achieve reach in the tens of millions, since roughly that many unique viewers tune into the broadcast regardless of how many times each person sees the ad.
An Instagram post might rack up 50,000 impressions but only reach 20,000 unique people, since some followers scroll past and see it more than once in their feed.
Billboard companies sell advertising space based partly on this same estimate of unique exposure, using traffic data to predict how many distinct drivers will pass a given location each month.
