Reach
Reach is the number of unique users who saw your ad at least once during the campaign window.
What does Reach actually mean?
Reach measures unique users: distinct individuals who saw your ad at least once. It's the denominator of the frequency calculation: Impressions / Reach = Frequency.
Reach matters most for brand awareness campaigns where the goal is exposure to as many distinct users as possible. For performance campaigns, reach is less important than conversion volume. You'd rather reach 10K users with a 3% conversion rate than 100K with 0.3%.
Reach is bounded by audience size and budget. A campaign targeting a 1% lookalike on Meta in the US can reach roughly 2.3M users at saturation; a 10% lookalike reaches ~23M. Most campaigns reach a fraction of theoretical maximum because of frequency and budget constraints.
Example
A campaign budgeted at $10,000 reached 80,000 unique users with 200,000 impressions. Frequency = 2.5 per user. Reach = 80,000.
When it matters
Reach is the volume side of brand-awareness reporting. For performance, conversions matter more than reach.
Related terms
Frequency
Frequency is the average number of times a single user has been exposed to your ad over a given window.
CPM
CPM is the cost to serve 1,000 impressions of your ad. It signals audience competitiveness and seasonal demand.
TOFU
TOFU is the awareness stage of the marketing funnel: cold prospecting to people who don't yet know your brand.
Lookalike audience
A lookalike audience targets new users who resemble an existing source list, typically your customers or your high-LTV cohort.
Find out which ads actually win.
advrt builds ads around your real product photos, tests them live on Meta and judges each one against your own account. Free plan, no credit card.