Match Rate vs. Reach Rate

Measuring Success

Most platforms will use Match Rate as a proxy for audience quality and as a measure of success. In addition to being a potentially misleading metric, there are several problems with using a match rate to gauge the quality of your audience data.

What's Wrong with ‘Match Rate?’

Match rate is merely the number of records found for a certain dataset in a particular ad platform’s database. For example, a 40% match rate on Facebook for a dataset of 100 profiles indicates that 40 of those profiles were found to exist on Facebook.

A Better Metric

While match rate can be a useful metric to consider when evaluating audience lists, it should not be used as the sole metric. Instead, we recommend considering other factors such as relevance, size, and targeting when evaluating the quality of audience lists.

At Primer, we use match rates to gauge initial data quality. But we use reach rate to measure our true addressable audience. We've included these handy graphics below to help you visualize:

Match Rate

Reach Rate

How Primer Defines ‘Reach Rate’

Reach refers to the number of unique people who saw your ad. The reach rate can be calculated by taking the reach of your campaign and dividing it by the total size of your audience. By measuring reach, you can get a better understanding of the size of your audience and the potential impact of your campaigns. This can help you optimize your targeting and budget allocation to maximize the ROI of your media campaigns.

Here are some tactics we use at Primer to increase our own reach rate:

• Increased budget

  • This allows us to be competitive in the auction for ad space within our desired placements. The more we spend, the more dollars the platform(s) has to work with when bidding within the auction.

• Adjust your campaign goals

  • More often than not, marketers will run campaigns through Facebook and LinkedIn with the chosen goal of “conversions”. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach, we find that it severely limits the reach of our ads. Instead, we run our campaigns with an “awareness” or “traffic” goal. This allows us to optimize for ad impressions and reach as opposed to forcing Facebook or LinkedIn to optimize for things like form submissions or some other down-funnel action.