What Is Reach in Digital Marketing?

What Is Reach in Digital Marketing?

Reach in digital marketing is the number of unique viewers who see your digital content. Determining reach is important for digital marketers because it can gauge how effective their marketing campaign is. Reach in digital marketing considers how many unique people have seen your social media content, paid advertising, website content, and even sponsored content.

Reach in digital marketing can often be confused with impressions, but the two are distinctly different. While reach refers to the number of unique people who see your content, impressions refer to the number of times content has been displayed, regardless of whether or not a new unique viewer has seen the content. 

For example, imagine your team ran an Instagram ad for a beauty brand. When a single viewer scrolled past that ad, it would count as an impression as well as a unique viewer. However, if that same person saw the ad again the next day, that would add another impression but not another unique viewer to your reach. 

You can calculate reach in digital marketing by using the following formula: 

Reach = impressions/frequency

Digital marketing teams, therefore, focus their efforts on increasing their campaigns’ reach to ensure that as many potential customers see their clients’ advertisements as possible. Calculating reach can be an effective tool in understanding how viewers are receiving brand information and predicting how they will view advertising in the future.