Digital marketing is growing in popularity and effectiveness given the overwhelming number of internet users in the world. As a result, the internet has the greatest potential of all media to improve a brand’s awareness and grow its consumer base. This idea leads to the most popular of marketing metrics: conversions. Conversions refer to how many people do what you want them to on your site as a percentage of the people who visit your website. This could include buying something, filling out a form, etc.
However, conversions aren’t the only important market metric. Two other metrics are impressions and reaches, and both of them are important. Here’s what they are and why you should pay attention to them.
What Are Impressions and Reach?
The internet is replete with very specific and technical definitions of reaches and impressions, but those are unnecessarily abstruse. Reach simply refers to the number of people who see your content. In a sense, it refers to the number of distinct people that see some content you’ve posted. In contrast, impressions refer to the number of times your content is displayed on some platform.
For example, suppose you write a post about one of your products on Facebook and one of your customers shares it. Now consider a customer who is friends with the sharing customer. They’ll see your post twice: once from you and the other time from their friend’s sharing. This whole experience counts as three impressions (your content was displayed twice to one person and once to another). However, you only reach two unique people (only two people saw the content).
Do Impressions and Reach Matter?
The short answer is yes, they do. Consider the scenario in which you have a lot of impressions but a short reach. This is going to raise your costs, as you’re paying much more for each view. Suppose you pay a certain amount to publish some content. Low reach means that you’re not expanding your customer base. Similarly, low impressions and far reach can also prove costly, as it means people don’t see your content many times. As a result, they’ll forget about your products.
Of course, these aren’t blanket interpretations to be applied to every case. Far reach and low impressions doesn’t necessarily suggest anything bad for a company whose products are impulsive buys. Interpreting the results correctly requires working with a professional digital marketing agency, and we can help with that.
At MediaForce, we offer e-commerce marketing, website design, social media marketing, and more. We’re a digital marketing and SEO agency in Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver, and we’ll help optimize your digital marketing strategies, so get in touch with us now.