Digital speak often sounds like a foreign language. Sometimes we’re not even sure what we’re talking about. To help you better wrap your brain around what is what, we’re breaking down impressions, reach and lookalike audiences.
Reach vs. Impressions
These two get confused a lot. That’s why we’re making it easy. Reach answers the question, “How many people saw my ad?” Impressions answer the question, “How many times was my ad displayed on the internet?” Impressions count the number of times your ad appears somewhere on the internet, regardless if it was clicked or not. The same person could see the same ad three times, and that’s three impressions, but only one person reached. Get it?
Which do you care about more?
As ALWAYS in digital…it depends.
Impressions are really only useful when it comes to calculating engagement rate. People typically take more than one touchpoint to interact with a brand, right? So engagements divided by impressions gives you the engagement rate.
Reach is a great way to measure the amount of awareness your ads are generating on the internet. However, reach isn’t the most accurate measure for engagement rate, because it doesn’t factor in if someone saw your ad more than once. What we’re basically saying is each metric is useful in its own way.
What is a lookalike audience?
Easy! It’s some of that scary targeting you hear about. We’d say we’re kidding, but we’re not. Shh..the government is always listening. Basically, you take a list of pre-existing APPROVED emails, and upload them into Facebook. The algorithm says, “Hey! Facebook! Target these people and then people similar to them.”
Where can you pull a lookalike audience from?
If you have a CRM of people who have OPTED IN to receive emails, that’s a great place to start. Or an email marketing account with a list of pre-approved email addresses. If you don’t have CTAs plastered on your website to collect emails, you’re seriously missing out on some great data. Once you get this data, feed it to Facebook, and see those reach and impressions grow.
The world of digital can be super duper confusing. Just give us a call or shoot us an email, and we’ll take care of it for you.
