Beyond Impressions: Why Unique Reach Should Be Your North Star

For years, many marketers have treated impressions as a proxy for success. In recent conversations with customers across industries, one pattern stood out: teams often celebrated big impression numbers but struggled to connect them to real business outcomes. That’s the trap: confusing volume with progress.

Impressions only confirm that an ad was served. They don’t reveal whether it reached the right person or whether it reached someone new at all. You can serve 5 million impressions and still only touch 1 million people five times each. That isn’t influence. That’s repetition—and the fastest way to ad fatigue.

The Impression Illusion: Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better

Frequency matters, but only when it’s deliberate. Repetition can strengthen recall if managed strategically. Without measurement, however, it wastes budget, frustrates audiences, and erodes trust.

When media plans prioritize volume over impact, they bloat. Budgets burn chasing impressions instead of outcomes. Campaigns appear busy but fail to drive demand.

Unique reach — actual people exposed to your message — should be the north star. It shows whether your investment is expanding audience breadth, not just inflating exposure counts.

The Rise of Outcome-Based Media Buying

Advertisers are shifting away from counting impressions and toward measuring audience impact. Increasingly, buyers are demanding outcome-based planning, which one customer called “performance planning.” This approach ties spend to what audiences do, not just what they see.

As part of this shift, media leads are asking for deeper transparency. They want platforms that can connect investment directly to trackable business results. In our conversations with procurement and brand teams, we see growing interest in streaming value, smarter targeting strategies, and measurement frameworks that move beyond CPM.

Unique reach is emerging as a key metric. Unlike impressions, which double-count the same person across platforms, unique reach measures unduplicated individuals. It reflects breadth, not just repetition, making it a superior top-of-funnel metric.

Maximizing unique reach, particularly early in the consumer journey, lays the foundation for later conversions and ensures budgets work harder. That’s why more advertisers are embracing cost per unique reach (CPR) as a modern efficiency benchmark. CPR aligns spend with actual people reached, enabling sequential storytelling - building awareness, then education, then action.

At Simulmedia, we focus on maximizing unique reach in the early stages of the consumer journey. A first exposure is far more valuable than repeated exposures to the same person. Without that first contact, there is no path to conversion.

The Overlap Problem: Why You’re Probably Paying Twice

The audience fragmentation is the new normal. As of July 2025, streaming accounts for 47.3% of total TV viewing, while cable and broadcast still hold meaningful shares at 22.2% and 18.4%. Platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video compete with dozens of others, and the average household is now reachable across multiple screens and apps at once.

Data from the Nielsen Gauge report. July 2025

Fragmentation isn’t the risk. Duplication is what drains budgets.

When advertisers treat linear and streaming separately, they lose control over audience overlap. Without deduplication, the same household may be hit across multiple platforms, inflating frequency while missing opportunities to expand reach. Many buyers underestimate this overlap because their systems aren’t built for cross-platform audience tracking.

Simulmedia’s TV+ platform solves this directly—tracking unique viewers across both linear TV and streaming to deliver deduplicated measurement and optimization. That means every dollar works harder. You’re not just buying impressions. You’re buying impact.

Here’s how a recent cross-channel campaign performed, run for one of our customers between January 1 and 16, 2025.

Data from Simulmedia’s TV+ Platform

Smart Budget Allocation

• 70% of spend was allocated to Linear TV
• 30% to Streaming/CTV
• But Simulmedia measured across both to optimize total outcomes

True Reach, Not Repetition

• Total Unique Reach: 9.4M people
  • Linear TV: 8.5M
  • Streaming/CTV: 770K
  • Deduplicated audience: 130K, preventing waste

High Impact at Lower Cost

• Total Impressions: 16.8M
• Blended CPM: $8.02
  • Linear TV CPM: $6.08
  • Streaming/CTV CPM: $27.90
  • Shows how costly streaming can be without deduplication

Efficient Performance Metrics

• Conversions: 120,055
  • 98% driven by Linear TV
• Conversion Rate: 1.27%
• CPCV (Cost Per Conversion View): $1.12

That’s $1.12 per action that can be attributed to a real person—not just an impression.

Incremental Reach

• 90.4% of unique reach came from Linear TV
• 8.2% was truly incremental from streaming/CTV
• With deduplication, we ensure every additional viewer adds real value

Even within a single network, duplication can run high. Some networks deliver more unique reach, while others lean heavily on repetition.

Data from Simulmedia’s TV+ Platform

The chart below breaks down unique vs. duplicate reach across the top 15 TV networks. Each bar shows total reach, split into unique (orange) and duplicate (blue) audiences. Networks with a higher share of unique reach, like CBS and NBC, are more effective at introducing your brand to new viewers. In contrast, others lean more heavily on repetition, which can lead to frequency saturation.

This visibility helps advertisers make smarter trade-offs between reach and frequency:

• To expand reach: prioritize networks with higher unique reach ratios
• To reinforce messaging: use controlled frequency where duplication is higher, but do so intentionally
• To optimize across channels: measure duplication directly, not by guesswork.

Conclusion: Make Unique Reach Your North Star

Unique reach provides clarity, control, and measurable impact across platforms.

How To Put It Into Practice:

• Align KPIs with unique reach and deduplicated frequency
• Use platforms that unify linear and streaming measurement
• Optimize to cost per unique reach, not just CPM
• Test early, then scale based on actual reach data

Smart reach beats mass delivery, and it’s the path to real brand growth.