Reach

Reach is the number of unique people who saw your ad at least once during the selected period. Unlike impressions, each person is counted only once – no matter how many times the ad was shown to them.

Formula

Reach is measured by the ad platform, not calculated. But it is closely tied to two other metrics:

Frequency = impressions ÷ reach

Example

A Meta campaign gets 120,000 impressions in one week and reaches 40,000 people. Reach is 40,000, and each person saw the ad three times on average.

Important: daily reach cannot be added up. If the campaign reaches 10,000 people on each of seven days, weekly reach may still be only 25,000, because many people were reached on several days.

Reach in lead generation

Reach is an awareness metric: it shows how big the pool of potential prospects is that your budget gets in front of. With small, well-defined audiences – in B2B or a local market, for example – it has a natural ceiling. Once the audience is exhausted, reach stops growing and only frequency goes up.

For lead generation, what counts in the end is not how many people saw an ad, but how many of them inquire and buy. Reach is an early indicator, not a measure of success. LeadMetrics syncs spend and daily metrics of your campaigns from Meta, Google Ads, TikTok and LinkedIn and connects them with leads and deals from your CRM. In dashboards you can see whether reach actually turns into closed deals.

Reach vs. impressions

• Reach: How many different people saw the ad?
• Impressions: How often was the ad shown in total?
• Frequency: How often did one person see the ad on average?

Common mistakes

• Adding up daily or campaign values: This overstates real reach because people are counted multiple times.
• Adding up platforms: Meta and TikTok don't know whom the other platform reached. Overlaps stay invisible.
• Making reach the goal: A campaign with huge reach and no leads is expensive visibility, not lead generation.