Solved: Facebook Ad Reach of 100,000 – What Does It Mean?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your question about Facebook ad reach. It's a common point of confusion, and honestly, the answer isn't what most people expect. You've hit on a really important point – just because a lot of people *see* an ad doesn't mean it's actually doing anything for your business.

The short answer is that 100,000 reach, on its own, means very little. It's what we'd call a vanity metric. It sounds impressive, but it rarely translates to actual results like sales or leads. Below I'll walk you through why that is, and what you should be focusing on instead to get a proper return from your ad spend.

Let's talk about that 100,000 reach... and why it means almost nothing

Here is the uncomfortable truth about awareness campaigns on platforms like Meta. When you set your campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very literal, command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being a very powerful but very literal tool, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever pull out a credit card and buy something. Why? Because those users are not in demand. Their attention is cheap. By optimising for reach, you are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product. It's a trap many people fall into because the big numbers feel good, but they don't pay the bills.

Think of it like this. You're handing out flyers for your new high-end restaurant. You could stand on the busiest motorway and hand a flyer to every single driver that goes past. You’d reach thousands of people, but how many of them are actually looking for a fine dining experience right at that moment? Almost none. Or, you could stand outside a popular theatre just as a show ends, and hand flyers to people who are already dressed up and looking for somewhere nice to eat. You’d reach far fewer people, but the quality of that audience would be infinitely higher. That's the differance between a 'Reach' campaign and a 'Conversions' campaign.

You need to stop chasing awareness and start chasing customers

The best form of brand awareness for any business isn't a high reach number; it's a competitor's customer switching to your product and telling their friends about it. That only happens through conversion. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisit for making a sale. You have to earn that awareness by delivering results first.

To do that, you need to stop thinking about your customer as a demographic. "Women aged 25-40 who like yoga" tells you nothing of value. It leads to generic ads that speak to no one. To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare.

Your ideal customer isn't a person; it's a problem state. Once you've figured out that nightmare, you can build a message they can't possibly ignore. This isn't about just listing features; it's about connecting with their frustration and showing them a better way.

See the difference? The first one talks about the tool. The second one talks about the client's life. That's how you get action, not just "awareness."

I'd say you need to forget reach and focus on these numbers instead

So if reach is the wrong metric, what are the right ones? It depends on your goal, but they all measure one thing: how much it costs you to get a desired result. The main ones are:

• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) or Cost Per Purchase (CPP): The average cost to get one new paying customer.
• Cost Per Lead (CPL): The average cost to get one person to give you their contact details (e.g., fill out a form).
• Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): The total revenue you generate for every pound you spend on ads. A 4x ROAS means you made £4 for every £1 spent.

What you should expect to pay for these can vary wildly depending on your industry, your offer, and the countries you're targeting. I've run campaigns for childcare services where we saw a CPL of around $10 per signup, and for an HVAC company in a competitive area where leads cost around $60 each. For eCommerce, a cost per purchase could be anywhere from £10 to £75. The key is knowing what a customer is actually worth to you, so you know how much you can afford to spend to get one. This is called Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Lifetime Value (LTV). Calculating this properly frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and unlocks aggressive, inteligent growth. That $60 lead for an HVAC company seems expensive, until you realise a new boiler installation is worth thousands.

I've built a small calculator for you below to help you understand your own numbers. Play around with it and see how small changes to your business model can dramatically change what you can afford to spend on ads.

You probably should start with a proper conversion campaign

So, how do you put this all into practice? You need to structure your campaigns properly. For most of our clients, we build campaigns around the marketing funnel. You dont need to get too complicated with this, but the basic idea is to have different campaigns for people who've never heard of you (Top of Funnel), people who've shown some interest (Middle of Funnel), and people who are close to buying (Bottom of Funnel).

For a new advertiser, I'd recomend you start at the top. This is where you test different audiences to see who responds best to your message. The key here is to be specific with your targeting. You gotta make sure to pick the right interests that are specific to your target audience. For instance, if you're targeting owners of eCommerce stores, targeting "Amazon" as an interest is a terrible idea. It's too broad. It includes millions of shoppers. Instead, you'd target interests like "Shopify", "WooCommerce", or people who are admins of a Facebook "Retail Page". These are far more likely to contain the actual people you want to reach.

Once you start getting traffic and some conversions, you can build audiences for retargeting. This is where you show ads to people who have already visited your website, added an item to their cart, or watched one of your videos. These audiences almost always perform the best because the people in them already know who you are. The performance difference can be huge, as you can see below.

You'll need an offer that people actually want

This is probably the most important point of all. Even with the perfect targeting, the perfect ad copy, and the perfect metrics, your campaigns will fail if your offer is weak. The number one reason I see campaigns fail is a bad offer. This is especially true in B2B marketing, but it applies everywhere.

The "Request a Demo" button is one of the worst offenders. It is a high-friction, low-value Call to Action. It presumes your prospect has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It instantly positions you as just another vendor.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. For a SaaS company, this is a free trial with no credit card required. Let them use the actual product and feel the transformation. For a service business, it could be a free, automated audit, a valuable checklist, or a short, powerful video training. For us, as a paid ads consultancy, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

A great offer does three things:

1. It focuses on a specific audience, which makes the message incredibly powerful.
2. It identifies an urgent and expensive problem that audience is facing.
3. It presents a clear, tangible solution that feels simple and less risky for a buyer to invest in.

If your ads aren't working, before you blame the targeting or the creative, take a long, hard look at your offer. Is it genuinely valuable to the person on the other side of the screen? Is it easy for them to say yes? If the answer is no, that's the first thing you need to fix.

I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a completely different way of thinking about advertising than simply boosting a post and watching the reach number go up. But this is the framework that actually drives growth. I've put the main points into a summary table for you below.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Putting all of this together – the right objective, the right metrics, the right targeting, the right message, and the right offer – is how you build a predictable, scalable system for growth. It takes time, testing, and expertise to get it right. It's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's about understanding your audience deeply and optimising every single step of the process.

This is exactly where professional help can make a huge differance. We've taken clients from spending money on vanity metrics to seeing things like a 1000% return on ad spend or reducing their cost per new customer from £100 down to just £7. If you feel like you're stuck and would like an expert eye on your strategy, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can review your current setup and give you some actionable advice.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh