Reach & delivery
What is Reach?
Reach is the number of unique people who saw your ad at least once. Unlike impressions, each person is counted only once no matter how many times the ad was shown to them, so reach measures how many distinct people you touched.
Example
If 4,000 people saw your ad — some once, some several times — your reach is 4,000, even if the ad was displayed 12,000 times in total. Divide those impressions by reach and you get an average frequency of 3.
Why it matters
Reach tells you how far your message actually spread across real people, which matters for awareness and for spotting when you're recycling the same audience. Paired with impressions it produces frequency, the early-warning metric for ad fatigue.
How to use and improve it
Grow reach with a larger audience and enough budget to serve it, and use the Reach or Awareness objective when the goal is exposure. If reach stalls while spend keeps rising, your audience is too small and frequency is climbing.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between reach and impressions?
Reach counts unique people; impressions count total views including repeats. Reach is always less than or equal to impressions.
What's the difference between reach and frequency?
Reach is how many different people saw the ad; frequency is how many times each of them saw it on average. Impressions = reach × frequency.
How do I increase reach without wasting budget?
Widen the audience and refresh creative so Meta can find new people, rather than pushing more budget into a small audience — which just raises frequency and CPM instead of reach.
Related
How does your account score?
A free Meta ads audit gives you a 0–100 score, shows wasted budget, and lists the exact next steps.
Run a free audit