Marketers have always gravitated toward the comfort of large reach numbers. On the surface, reach promises scale, influence, and opportunity. But outside of rare cultural moments like the Super Bowl, where audiences actively lean into advertising rather than feel disrupted by it, reach rarely delivers what marketers imagine. The bigger the reach number, the more likely it is to be inflated, unverified, unprovable, and disconnected from real human attention. And yet marketers continue to chase it, even when it leads them astray.
Social platforms have engineered this obsession. X, Meta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and others now operate less as digital communities and more as valuation-driven machines. Reach is the currency these platforms use to impress investors, inflate quarterly reports, and support sky-high stock prices. The larger the reported reach, the more powerful the company appears. That makes reach far more of a financial instrument than a marketing metric. It becomes a number no one can audit, no one can verify, and no one is held accountable for—yet marketers build strategies and budgets around it.
Part of the problem is what reach actually represents: a theoretical audience, not a confirmed one. A brand’s message may be delivered into a feed, but the impressions would be a fraction of the reach count. It might pass by a dormant account. It might land on an inactive profile. It might be delivered to someone who hasn’t logged in for months. Sadly, reach often includes accounts belonging to people who have passed away. But because reach is defined by delivery—not human attention—platforms keep counting them. That makes reach a number that doesn’t reflect the real world, yet it appears legitimate because it’s large.
Three forces reinforce these inflated reach metrics: valuation, advertising, and investors. Valuation rewards companies that show growth, so platforms rely on reach to demonstrate momentum even when real engagement declines. Advertising revenue depends on large audiences, so platforms maintain swollen reach numbers to justify higher rates. Investors demand scale, so executives are incentivized to keep reach as high as possible, even if the underlying audience hasn’t been active in years. These forces create a feedback loop where reach grows regardless of whether the audience actually exists in any meaningful sense.
This pattern isn’t new. Traditional media spent decades inflating their reach long before social networks came along. In the newspaper era, circulation reach included every estimated reader per household—even if only one person ever opened the paper. If an entire apartment building emptied a newspaper box, every copy was counted as a reader. If someone only wanted coupons, they were considered fully reached. If someone grabbed the paper for the sports section alone, they were counted the same as a cover-to-cover reader. The industry embraced reach as a convenient fiction because advertisers wanted scale and publishers wanted revenue.
Social platforms took that old logic and supercharged it. Instead of estimating multiple readers per copy, they simply keep every account forever. Reach accumulates automatically because the audience base is never cleaned. Inactive users, abandoned profiles, bots, forgotten sign-ups, and deceased individuals all stay part of the reach total. When reach becomes the primary indicator of business health, honesty becomes risky. No platform wants its valuation shaken by admitting how much of its reach is artificial.
Marketers pay the price. Budgets are spent on campaigns that appear to reach millions but barely generate measurable engagement. Impressions rise, yet responses stagnate. The promise of reach creates a false sense of success, pushing marketers toward strategies based on illusion rather than impact. Reach becomes a vanity metric—a number that looks impressive but can’t be proven, validated, or tied directly to meaningful behavior.
The Super Bowl remains an exception because its reach reflects genuine attention. People watch the ads intentionally. They discuss, replay, and rate them. That’s not passive reach—it’s active reach. And active reach is rare. Most social platforms, by contrast, deliver ads into crowded feeds where attention is thin and engagement is diluted. There, reach is simply the count of how many times a post was technically eligible to appear, not a measure of how many humans actually saw it.
The industry would benefit from acknowledging that, as currently defined, reach doesn’t reflect reality. It’s a probabilistic number used for financial storytelling rather than marketing clarity. Until marketers demand transparency, question inflated metrics, and prioritize verified engagement over theoretical reach, platforms will continue to present their audiences as larger-than-life. They’ll continue counting ghosts, dormant accounts, and historical artifacts toward their reach totals because the market rewards the illusion.
Reach, in its current form, is a mirage. Marketers don’t need bigger reach—they need authentic reach. They need audiences who are present, attentive, and responsive. They need metrics that reflect reality rather than distortion. And they need to stop building strategies around numbers that can’t be proven and don’t truly exist.
What Really Matters: Conversions
After all the inflated reach numbers, theoretical audiences, dormant profiles, and investor-driven growth narratives, marketing comes down to one irreducible truth: conversions are what matter. Reach doesn’t pay the bills. Engagement doesn’t keep the lights on. Impressions don’t grow a business unless they demonstrably contribute to revenue. Conversions are the moments when marketing stops being hypothetical and becomes real—when a human takes an action that moves the business forward. Everything else is noise unless it can be tied back to that outcome.
This doesn’t mean secondary metrics are irrelevant. Engagement, impressions, and even reach have value when they are statistically connected to conversion patterns. A high-engagement audience that reliably advances toward purchase is worth far more than a massive, uninterested one. Impressions that correlate with increased brand lift, higher search activity, or improved sales readiness have strategic value. Engagement signals intent. Impressions establish familiarity. But none of these metrics stand on their own. Their only real purpose is to support, accelerate, or predict conversions.
That’s why marketers must recalibrate their focus. Inflated reach numbers might look impressive on a slide, but they are meaningless if they don’t lead to measurable outcomes. The same is true for views, likes, shares, and comments. These signals can be helpful, but only when they map to the actual behaviors that matter—purchases, leads, appointments, registrations, renewals, upgrades, or any other conversion that drives revenue. The platforms won’t provide this clarity because inflated numbers work in their favor. Marketers must demand it. They must build attribution models, analyze real customer journeys, and tie every tactic back to its contribution to conversion velocity.
In the end, marketing’s job is not to reach the most people; it’s to persuade the right people. Not to generate the most impressions, but to create the most impact. And not to chase the biggest audience, but to move the audience that actually exists. When marketers stop treating reach as an achievement and start treating conversions as the only meaningful measure of success, they’ll finally see the difference between numbers that look good and numbers that matter.
©2025 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved | DisclosureOriginally Published on Martech Zone: Reach: Why Do Marketers Keep Chasing Audiences That Don’t Actually Exist?