In the earlier days of Facebook, getting organic reach was easier.
You’d post engaging content that received shares and comments, and naturally it would pop up in your audience’s news feeds.
However, over time, Facebook’s algorithms progressively changed and now getting organic reach is more difficult than it’s ever been. Paid reach is the new name of the game when it comes to advertising on Facebook.
Reach is one of the many important metrics shown in Facebook’s Insights page.
But how does one improve their ad’s reach? And how is it different from another similar metric impressions?
Continue reading to learn how to improve your Facebook ad reach. Get more engagement, conversions, and identify what’s working, or not working in your online ad campaign.
What is Facebook Ads Reach and What Advantage Does it Give Your Brand?
One of Facebook Ads most important metrics is reach. But what does that mean exactly?
Reach is the number of unique Facebook users’ that saw your ad. Reach doesn’t mean that your ad received any engagement, however. It simply refers to the number of people who viewed your ad on their Facebook profile.
While the reach metric may sound similar to impressions, there are key differences we’ll explain later in this article.
Facebook’s reach objective lets you show ads to the maximum number of people in your target audience while sticking to your budget. This is particularly useful if you want to show your ad to as many people as possible. This will also increase brand awareness or to reach another marketing goal, such as:
- Building traffic
- Generating leads
- Receiving messages
- Engaging with your audience
- Get video views
- Get app installs
You can customize the paid reach campaign to show your ads in specific geographical locations or to change the frequency of times your ads are shown to the same people. For example, you can determine how many times an individual person views your ad in a day, and the time in between the next time they see the ad to reduce ad fatigue.
How is Facebook Ads Reach Calculated?
Facebook uses data sampling to analyze huge amounts of subsets of user data to come up with a highly accurate, approximated representation of the number of reaches for each ad.
While data sampling doesn’t analyze all of the data used, it’s still remarkably reliable and accurate and allows for quick time analysis so marketers can see how their ads are performing relatively quickly.
How does Ad Reach Compare to Impressions?
You may be curious to understand the difference between Facebook’s Ads reach and ad impressions, as they both sound pretty similar.
Both metrics show you how many times your ad has been shown on Facebook, but there is one key difference:
- Reach is the number of unique people who saw your ad.
- Impressions are the number of times your ad has been shown on Facebook.
For example, if your ad reach says 500, this means an estimated 500 unique people encountered your ad on Facebook. If your impressions were at 1000, this means your ad was shown 1000 times, but not to 1000 individual people — there were many people who viewed your ad multiple times.
Which One is Better to Track?
Reach and impressions need to be used together to give you more information on your ad’s performance.
Using the same example as above, if your ad’s impressions were 1000 and ad reach was 500, you have many people seeing the ad at least twice.
Note: it’s important to keep in mind that both the reach and impressions don’t indicate that somebody clicked on your ad. It only means that the ad was shown on Facebook.
Why It’s Important to Measure Both
So why measure both reach and impressions? The answer is simple — to reduce ad fatigue.
When you know both the reach (unique viewers) and impressions (number of times an ad is shown) you can start to get an idea of ad frequency. This refers to how many times your audience is seeing the same ad.
Marketers want to find the perfect sweet spot to learn how many times people can see their ad before they lose interest and the ad’s performance begins to decrease. This is also referred to as “effective frequency,” and it can help improve conversion rates and find the optimal budget for the specific campaign.
How to Maximize the Best Potential Reach
Maximizing their best potential paid reach on Facebook ads is every marketer’s goal. Let’s examine a few tactics to get your ads seen by more people who are likely to convert:
- Install the Facebook Pixel. This tracking code snippet can be placed on your website to notify you when a customer bought something because they saw your Facebook ad. Over time, Facebook’s algorithms will deliver ads to people who are more likely to convert.
- Facebook Pixel can also be used for retargeting, or remarketing, ads. Remarketing ads show on Facebook after people visited your website, which can improve conversion rates and click-throughs.
- Boost an already successful post to reach more people. Try to get as much organic reach before paying for paid reach. This means creating engaging content that will generate lots of likes, shares, and comments before you even promote it.
- Use different sets of audience types in Facebook to target different sets of people. Facebook allows you to create custom audiences, letting you input the emails of past customers, or you can use lookalike audiences, which automatically shows your ads to people who exhibit the same browsing characteristics as your existing audiences. You can begin split testing the different audiences to see which group is more responsive to your ads.
- Craft powerful posts that are eye-catching and have a clear call-to-action to get more engagement.
Hire Denver PPC to Manage and Accelerate Your Facebook Campaigns
Denver PPC is an experienced Colorado-based team of PPC professionals.
Our company has over a decade of experience crafting, handling, and managing PPC ads across various platforms, including Facebook Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Bing Ads, and more.
We offer our clients outstanding PPC management, including Facebook Ads management.
Are you a marketing agency looking to offer more services to your existing clients? We are also a white label PPC management and white label PPC outsourcing agency that can help get you serious results, all while your company gets the credit.
Have more questions about optimizing your Facebook Ads campaign? Contact us today.
Call or text us at 877-584-3772 to get your free PPC account review.
