when you’re focusing on creating brand awareness for your business, it's important to know what impressions and reach mean - and better yet, what their difference is.

impressions are the number of times your post has been seen. reach is the number of people who have seen your post.

impressions

impressions are the number of times your content is seen by people. for example, if your content has 10 million impressions and 1 million unique users saw it (reach), then your campaign had 9 million impressions that didn't result in any kind of engagement with the brand or product being advertised.

reach

reach is the number of people who have seen your post. reach is a better metric for measuring for example paid ad effectiveness because it shows what percent of people who were exposed to your ad actually saw it at least once (or more). this gives you an idea of how effective your targeting was, and whether or not those targeted users were receptive to seeing what you had to offer.

which one should you measure?

short answer: both. impressions and organic content = great. for paid ads you want to know your ad reach.

long answer: you want to know how well your content resonated with users? impressions can help you display your brand awareness by measuring how many times one user views your content. for paid ads they don't necessarily mean much more because they don't tell you how well your ad performed in terms of engagement or conversion rate. relevance does, and this is why reach matters more than impressions do when it comes down to it!