Why measuring reach is not the same as measuring impact
Launch library · evergreen read
Reach counts how many people encountered a campaign's message: views, impressions, attendees at an event. Impact asks what actually changed as a result of that encounter, and a message that reached a huge number of people can still have changed very little if it failed to genuinely land with anyone who actually saw it.
Confusing the two can lead a campaign to prioritise activities that generate large reach numbers over activities that produce smaller but more meaningful engagement, simply because reach is easier to measure and report than the harder to capture question of actual impact achieved on that particular audience, which usually takes more than one figure to fully describe.
Genuinely useful measurement treats reach as a starting point worth tracking, but insists on also asking the harder question of what happened next, whether attitudes shifted, whether behaviour changed, rather than stopping comfortably at the easily countable, easily reported figure alone at the top of a report.