Paid Media

Reach Calculator

Reach is how many distinct people you touched, and it is the number that decides whether a campaign can move a market or only a mailing list. Enter impressions and frequency to get reach, plus what share of your audience you have actually covered.

Your numbers

Result

Unique reach240,000
Share of audience reached60.0%
Impressions for full coverage1,000,000Impressions needed to touch the whole audience at this frequency.
Audience not yet reached160,000

FormulaReach = impressions ÷ frequency

Worked example

600,000 impressions at an average frequency of 2.5 means 240,000 unique people. Against an addressable audience of 400,000 that is 60 percent coverage, leaving 160,000 people untouched. Covering everyone at the same frequency would take 1,000,000 impressions, so you need roughly 67 percent more delivery to finish the job.

What to watch for

Reach numbers are deduplicated inside one platform and almost never across platforms. If you run Meta, YouTube and programmatic together, the sum of the three reach figures overstates real coverage, sometimes badly.

Coverage above roughly 70 percent of a defined audience is where incremental spend usually starts producing frequency instead of new people. That is the point to either widen the audience or shift budget to conversion work.

Small audiences are expensive to cover. A 20,000-person account-based list will hit high frequency fast, so I plan those buys around creative rotation from day one rather than treating it as a broad reach campaign.

Frequently asked questions

How is reach different from impressions?

Impressions count every time an ad was shown, including repeats to the same person. Reach counts each person once. One person seeing five ads is five impressions and one reach.

How do I estimate my addressable audience?

Use the platform's own audience size estimate for your targeting, then discount it. Platform estimates count accounts rather than people and skew high, so I plan against a conservative fraction of the quoted number.

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This calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server, logged, or stored. Figures are for planning and do not constitute financial advice. See disclosures.