You often hear about reach, frequency and impressions when talking about the performance of your digital marketing campaigns – and specifically, your social media ads.
Tracking the right metrics is essential for optimising digital marketing campaigns. Reach, frequency, and impressions are three key indicators that impact ad effectiveness across all platforms however particularly on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Not having enough of one (or all) of these might be the reason your marketing isn’t working.
But what are they? And how can you make sure you’re hitting all of the right numbers?
Let’s go in-depth into tracking digital marketing performance. In this article we’ll take a look at each of these terms and help you understand how to track and improve them in a meaningful way.
Here’s a simplified breakdown:
For example, if your reach is 100, and your impressions are 200, you can assume each person (or user) saw it twice (for a frequency of two).
This depends on the platform you’re publishing on. Generally, you’ll have a ‘back end’ with all of your analytics – this will be where your reach, frequency and impressions numbers will be hiding. But not all platforms will give you all three numbers – you may need to do some of your own maths.
For example: Facebook and Instagram give you reach and impressions on your organic posts, but LinkedIn only shows impressions. On the paid side, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn both give you the frequency numbers, so you don’t have to try and figure it out for yourself.
In short, check your platform’s analytics dashboard to monitor these metrics, and be aware that you may need to calculate frequency manually in some cases.
Create different ads to suit different ‘slices’ of your audience. For example, you can have a remarketing campaign for audiences who have already seen your products, and a general campaign for each of your customer avatars. Each campaign should have its own ad with unique copy and visuals. To see results, they need to be fair-sized audiences with a decent budget – so start with one and expand if needed. (As a note an minimum audience size of at least 1,000 is generally needed for most platforms to run a remarketing campaign)
Try to create content that speaks to each of your audiences both collectively and individually. You can boost these posts to specific audiences that match.
To expand your reach, segment your audience and create targeted campaigns:
As a rule, we like the frequency between 2 and 5. Any less, and your message will not sink in—any more, and it will become oversaturated and repetitive.
Many advertising platforms allow you to set frequency caps in the backend, helping to control how often users see your ads. This feature ensures that ads don’t become overwhelming or repetitive while maintaining effective exposure.
Optimising frequency for paid ads can also come from budget optimisation. If you pay more money, you can get in front of your audience more often. To reduce your frequency, simply reduce the budget. If you don’t have the budget but you’d still like to increase the frequency, you can try reducing your audience size.
When adjusting budgets, the best approach is to go slow. Bring it down or up by a few dollars a day and see how it goes – don’t drastically slash or double your budget or your results may suffer!
To summarise optimise your frequency by:
Impressions help gauge ad visibility and performance. Balancing impressions requires weighing the cost of high-value ad placements against cheaper inventory. Higher-value placements often provide better engagement, while cheaper options can help extend reach within a budget.
In addition, impressions are usually more up-to-date figures, so you can look at them every day to get a sense of how your campaign is performing. For example, if your ad has been running for a day or two and has few to no impressions, it means there could be something wrong with your campaign – your audience might be too small, or your ad might be getting penalised because of its copy or imagery.
As a final note, brand awareness campaigns can focus on impressions. The objective is to reach a wider audience and get the name out far and wide. However, you also want to combine impressions with your frequency metrics to make sure the message sticks.
By understanding reach, frequency, and impressions, you can fine-tune your paid media strategy for better engagement and ROI. Regular monitoring and strategic adjustments will ensure your ads are seen by the right audience at the right frequency.
Start optimising your ads today.
Let's talk!
