Report Reach You Can Defend

Every agency reports numbers, and there is a constant temptation to report the biggest available one. We recently rebuilt how we count reach across the accounts we manage, and the process was a useful reminder of how many different things the word 'views' can mean.

Know which kind of number you have

There are two very different ways to count. Account-level figures, from the platforms' own insights, count every view on an account in a period, including views of older content. Post-level figures count only views of content published in that period. Both are legitimate. They answer different questions, and they can differ by a factor of ten.

The mistake is not using one or the other. It is quoting the larger figure while implying it means the smaller thing. 'Our content generated a hundred million views' and 'the accounts we manage received a hundred million views' can both be describing the same spreadsheet, and only one of them might be true.

Say what the number includes

When we report reach now, we state the window, the platforms, whether the figure is account-level or post-level, and when a client joined relative to that window. If an account came on halfway through the quarter, its earlier audience is not something we built, and the report says so.

It makes the headline slightly less dramatic and the relationship considerably stronger. A client who can repeat your number to their own board, with its footnote, and have it hold up, is a client who trusts the next number you send.

Round down, never up

Where a figure is partial, because one platform's data was incomplete or an export capped out, we report it as a floor: 'at least' this many. It is a small habit that removes a whole category of awkward conversation later.

The number is not the goal

Reach is a proxy for attention, and attention is a proxy for the outcome a client actually cares about. The most useful reports connect the three honestly, and the most dangerous ones inflate the first while quietly ignoring the last.