What is reach?
Reach counts people, not views. If a campaign is shown ten million times to two million people, the impressions are ten million, the reach is two million and the average frequency is five. It can be expressed as a raw number or as a percentage of a target audience, and it is measured per channel, per campaign and, with more difficulty, across channels, where the same person seen on television, in a feed and on a billboard has to be counted once.
It is one of the oldest numbers in advertising, born in television and print planning, where a media buyer bought gross rating points and calculated reach and frequency from them. Digital platforms made it easier to count and harder to trust, because each platform reports its own reach by its own method and nobody's numbers add up across the plan.
Why it matters
Why reach matters
Because brands grow by being known to more people, and reach is the measure of that. The research on how brands grow is consistent: broad reach among light and non-buyers moves the business more than heavy frequency among the already loyal. A campaign that reaches sixty percent of a category's buyers once does more for a brand than one that reaches ten percent six times. Reach is the KPI for awareness work for that reason, and the first number a media planner looks at when a plan comes back.
It is also the honest counterweight to engagement. A post with ten thousand likes and a reach of fifteen thousand is a post the brand's fans enjoyed. A post with two hundred likes and a reach of three million is advertising. For fashion and beauty brands in particular, where the feed rewards talking to the converted, reach is the number that keeps the campaign pointed at new customers.
In practice
How reach works in practice
- 01
The media planner sets a reach target against a defined audience, say seventy percent of women 25 to 44 in the United States, then builds a channel mix that gets there efficiently: television and online video for breadth, social for precision, out of home for the places people actually are. Each channel is bought with reach and frequency in mind, often with frequency caps to stop the budget being spent showing the same person the same ad twelve times.
- 02
Measurement comes from the platforms for digital, from panels and ratings services for television and radio, and from traffic and audience data for out of home. Cross-channel reach needs deduplication, which is done by modeling or by a measurement partner, and it is always an estimate. Creative matters here too: an ad that people skip in two seconds may count as reached and achieve nothing, which is why reach is paired with attention and recall measures on serious plans.
- 03
Views, a number that gets reported as reach more often than it should, are a different thing. A video with five million views may have reached two million people, some of them several times, and the platform's definition of a view may be two or three seconds. The view count is a sign of scale; reach is the measurement.
- 04
Reach is read as a curve, not a total. Plot unique people reached against spend over the flight and the line flattens at some point, where each extra dollar is buying the same people again. That bend is the signal to move budget to a channel that is still finding new people. Ask platforms for on-target reach rather than total reach, since a campaign for one audience can report impressive numbers made up largely of everyone else.
At RIOT
Reach at RIOT
Our films have run where reach is the point: the e.l.f. Mirror Mix launch film at about five million views, the Red Bull Kumite screens in Times Square, where the audience is whoever happens to be walking through the most crowded square in New York, and the Bogg Bags CTV spot "Real Life, Worry Free," made for a screen that reaches a whole household at once. Each one was made to be seen by people who had not asked to see it, which is what reach-led creative has to do.
Watch out
What people get wrong about reach
Confusing it with impressions or with views. Impressions count exposures, views count a platform's idea of a watch, reach counts people, and the gaps between them are large. The other mistake is treating reach as the whole story. Reach among the wrong audience is a billboard in the desert. And frequency is not the enemy: one exposure rarely does anything, and a reach plan with no frequency is a plan to be seen once and forgotten.
