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Reach

The total number of unique users who have seen your ad or content.

Definition

Reach is the total number of unique users who have been exposed to your ad or content at least once. Unlike impressions, reach counts each person only once regardless of how many times they saw your ad.

Why Reach Matters

Reach helps you understand:

  • How many people your campaign is touching
  • Brand awareness potential
  • Audience size for retargeting

Reach vs Impressions

If one person sees your ad 5 times, that's 5 impressions but only 1 reach.

Why It Matters

Reach is the total number of unique people who see your ad. It's the foundation metric of brand awareness campaigns and determines the size of your potential audience. Understanding reach helps you plan budget, estimate market coverage, and avoid over-saturating small audiences with too much frequency.

Examples

  • •A Meta campaign reaching 500,000 unique users with brand awareness optimization
  • •Comparing reach vs impressions to understand how many unique people saw the ad vs total views
  • •Planning reach targets based on total addressable market size for a product launch

Common Mistakes

  • ✕Confusing reach with impressions — reach counts unique people, impressions count total views (including repeats)
  • ✕Optimizing for reach when your goal is conversions, leading to broad but unqualified traffic
  • ✕Not monitoring reach relative to audience size — when reach approaches audience size, performance often drops
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