10,000 impressions, great, that’s how many times my ad, my website, my post has been seen. But what does seen mean? A glance, as short as the blink of an eye – counts as reach. The tired glance of a train passenger at a passing billboard, the endless scrolling through the Instagram feed, the possible reader of a magazine – counts as reach. 10,000 impressions. Maybe not that much?
Reach is a typical “vanity metric”. Very impressive when it’s really big and a true booster for vanity. Although used everywhere, the metric is difficult to compare. While 10,000 monthly impressions on Instagram is a good start, 10,000 monthly page views on one’s website is quite desirable. Because the quality of a page view on your website is higher than that of an impression of an Instagram post or a Google Ad. A visitor to your website engages more intensively with your brand, a concentrated listener of your podcast might be worth much more than a brief moment of attention on a social media app.
To use reach as a meaningful metric, it is useful to consider reach as one metric out of several, define objectives and evaluate cross-platform data and benchmarks: so that 10,000 apples are not compared to 10,000 pears.
