Reach (in French: portée) measures the total number of unique accounts that were exposed to a piece of content - counting each person once regardless of how many times they saw it. It is one of the two primary volume metrics in influencer marketing alongside impressions, and the standard metric for assessing unduplicated audience coverage in a campaign.
What is Reach?
Reach = the number of unique individuals who saw the content.
This is the key distinction from impressions:
- Reach: 40,000 unique accounts saw the post (each person counted once)
- Impressions: 100,000 total displays of the post (including people who saw it multiple times)
The ratio of impressions to reach produces frequency - the average number of times each person in the reached audience saw the content: 100,000 impressions ÷ 40,000 reach = 2.5 frequency.
Example: A creator with 200,000 followers publishes a feed post. Due to the algorithm, the post reaches 42,000 unique accounts (a 21% reach rate). Those 42,000 accounts generate 105,000 impressions, meaning each person who saw it saw it an average of 2.5 times.
Reach vs. Follower Count
A creator's reach is almost always significantly lower than their follower count - and the difference matters enormously for campaign evaluation.
Why reach is lower than follower count:
- Social algorithms do not show every post to every follower
- Inactive followers who haven't engaged in months or years see almost nothing
- Accounts that follow thousands of people have congested feeds where content from any individual account rarely appears
For campaign budgeting and CPM calculations, reach should always be the denominator - not follower count. Using follower count overstates apparent reach efficiency and leads to unrealistic CPM benchmarks.
Organic Reach Rate
Reach rate = (Reach ÷ Follower count) × 100
Average organic reach rates by platform (2024–2025):
- Instagram feed post: 10–25% of followers
- Instagram Story: 5–15% of followers
- TikTok: Highly variable (algorithm-driven), can range from 5% to 1,000%+ of follower count due to non-follower distribution
- YouTube: Measured as views relative to subscriber count; varies enormously by niche
Total Campaign Reach
When running campaigns with multiple creators, brands measure total campaign reach and unduplicated reach:
- Total reach = sum of reach from all creators (may count the same person multiple times if they follow multiple creators in the campaign)
- Unduplicated reach = total unique individuals reached across the entire campaign (harder to calculate without platform-level data; typically estimated using audience overlap modelling)
For awareness campaign reporting, unduplicated reach is the most meaningful metric - it tells the brand how many unique people were actually exposed to the campaign message.
Maximising Reach vs. Maximising Conversion
Reach is the right primary KPI for awareness campaigns. It is not the right primary KPI for conversion campaigns - a campaign that reaches 5 million people but generates zero purchases has done nothing commercially useful. The relationship between reach and conversion requires downstream metrics (click-through rate, purchase rate) to be meaningful.
