Reach
How many different people your budget found, not how many times it showed up.
What it means
Reach is the number of different people who saw your Meta ads in the period, counted once each however many times they saw them. Impressions counts every render instead, so 300,000 impressions against 100,000 people means the average person saw you three times. Meta does the counting, so it won't line up with the visitors your site records.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Unique people is Meta's own de-duplication across the accounts and devices it can tie together. It undercounts a household sharing a tablet and overcounts one person on two logins.
The date range does the rest. Reach is deduplicated inside whatever range you pick, so a 30-day figure is always smaller than its four weekly figures added together.
Worked example. A campaign spends €5,000 in a month and buys 300,000 impressions. Meta reports Reach of 100,000, so FrequencyFrequencyA read on ad fatigue in your audience.Under 2 is healthy is 3 — the average person saw the ad three times for their share of the €5,000.
Now double the budget on the same audience. Impressions go to 600,000, Reach crawls to 120,000, and Frequency jumps to 5. Audiences run out of people long before budgets run out of money.
It answers the question
How many different people did this month's budget put you in front of? Reach flat while spend climbs means you're paying to show the same faces the same ad again.
Why it matters
Reach is the size of the room. Every purchase a campaign will ever produce comes from someone inside it, so a campaign that stops growing its Reach has already met its ceiling — no bid change or budget rise gets past that.
It's also the honest half of the fatigue story. Frequency rising is the symptom people notice; Reach refusing to grow is the cause. Fix the pool and the symptom clears on its own.
What good looks like
There's no universal number — Reach is a count, so it follows your budget and your market size. Judge it against your own last 90 days at similar spend, and against the pool you're targeting: reaching 100,000 of a 2 million audience leaves room, reaching 100,000 of a 150,000 audience doesn't. The question isn't whether Reach is high, it's whether it still grows when your budget does.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Widen the biggest ad set | Strip the narrow interest stacks and raise the lookalike percentage where most of the money sits | Reach up 30–60% | 3–5 days | Colder people cost more to convert. CPC (Link) and cost per purchase usually rise for a week before they settle. |
| Fast Switch the closed placements back on | Add Reels, Stories and Audience Network to ad sets running Feed only | Reach up on the same budget | 2–5 days | A Feed video dropped into Reels reads as an ad. Thumbstop on those placements comes in low and drags the account average with it. |
| Slow Open a neighbouring market | Give one country you already ship to its own campaign and its own creative | Reach structurally higher | 1 quarter | Shipping, returns and language have to work before the ads are the problem, and the account relearns from zero for a few weeks. |
| Slow Build for the formats that travel | Make vertical video for Reels, where the auction shows you to people who've never heard of you | Reach up per euro spent | 4–6 weeks | Production money, and the extra people sit further from buying — Purchase Value rarely grows at the same rate Reach does. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Reach alone tells you how many people you found. Next to Frequency, it tells you whether the budget is finding people or repeating itself.
Still finding people
New faces every week and nobody seeing the ad too often. This is the only corner where more money is the obvious answer.
Growing and crowding
You added budget and got some new people plus a lot of repeats. It works today and it's the shape that turns into fatigue in a month.
You pulled back
Less money, fewer people, no pressure on the audience. A clean result, not an improvement.
Same room, louder
The pool is shrinking while you spend the same on it. Click rates usually start sliding from here.
These two are the same budget cut in half, and only together do they say what it bought. Frequency of 4 looks like fatigue until you see Reach doubled alongside it — that's a bigger audience worked harder, not a smaller one worn out. Reach flat with Frequency at 4 is the version to worry about.
Together they show whether reaching more people turns into meeting more people. Reach climbing while your New Customer share stays flat means the extra faces aren't buying — the targeting widened but the offer only lands with the people you already had.
Common misreads
Anyone who saw two of your campaigns gets counted twice, so the sum is always too big. Read the account figure Meta reports, or read each row on its own.
Reach counts people shown the ad, and almost all of them never clicked. A campaign that reaches 100,000 and sends 2,000 visits is behaving normally.
Check spend first. Reach follows the budget closely early in a campaign, and a mid-month budget cut shows up here before it shows up anywhere else.
Also called
Unique reach · people reached · unique users
See yoursYour Reach for the last 30 days, with Frequency and Impressions beside it.
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