What is reach vs. impressions?

Reach is how many different people saw something. Impressions is how many times it was shown, counting repeats.

Reach counts people. Impressions count showings. If one person sees your ad five times, that’s a reach of one and five impressions. Divide impressions by reach and you get frequency: the average number of times each person saw it.

Platforms and tools label these differently, and “views” can mean either one depending on where the number came from. That matters when you compare. In a real Arcus content report for a hard seltzer brand, views meant organic impressions from the brand’s social tool, and Instagram and Facebook were kept apart and never added together, because the same person can be counted on both.

Why it matters

Impressions are always the bigger number, which is why they lead so many recaps. Ten impressions can be one person seeing an ad ten times.

An example

Example (made-up numbers): a campaign reports 3,000,000 impressions. Reach is 500,000 people, so the average person saw it six times. Whether that’s good depends on the goal, and it’s a very different story from three million people.

Where it misleads

Adding impressions or reach across platforms or reports. The same people are counted in each total, so the sum overstates how many people you reached.

How Arcus handles it

Every answer says which one a number is and where it came from, and keeps platforms separate unless there’s a way to remove the overlap.

More in our guide: Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram): how to tell what worked