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There’s a strange asymmetry. In engineering, nobody would brag about uptime if there were no users actually online. Yet in marketing, the same blind spot happens with reach.
You’ve seen those dashboards, the ones glowing with “millions of contacts.” For a moment they look impressive, like a system humming with life. But ask yourself: how many of those people would even recognize the brand tomorrow?
That’s the catch in the reach vs brand awareness game. Reach can be bought in bulk; awareness has to be earned in memory and trust.
A million impressions are technically easy. But the real question isn’t about scale, it’s about memory. If the next day no one searches your brand, all you’ve bought is noise.
Instead of abstract numbers, let’s take a closer look at one concrete case from SmartyAds’ work. A fintech company proudly reported a million impressions and tens of thousands of clicks. The dashboard looked flawless, growth charts rising like a startup dream. The CTO highlighted the curves, investors nodded in approval.
But six months later the reality surfaced: Google Trends was flat, branded searches never took off, and returning users were almost nonexistent. All that remained was the memory of a polished report, without any real memory in the minds of customers.
Because the dashboard had replaced reality. The numbers became an indicator of “success,” even though the key signals were alarming: churn was growing, brand queries were absent, and repeat visits were approaching zero. Reach records the contact, but it cannot measure the depth of perception, and that’s exactly why it’s dangerous as the only guiding metric.
To distinguish real growth from phantom growth, other tools are needed:
A PM once looked at a sheet full of thousands of click rows and said, “This isn’t an audience. It’s a ghost passing through.” You couldn't put it more accurately, and in metric terms, it means a lack of cohort stability.
And in moments like these, you don't feel anger or even panic, you feel exhaustion. You look at the dashboards that are shining, but you know that the business is still at a standstill.
In SmartyAds’ work, situations like this are not the exception but the rule: campaigns deliver millions of impressions, yet key indicators such as retention and branded search remain stagnant. This mismatch is why the company systematically introduced additional measurement frameworks, from brand recall studies to search demand tracking. Paradoxically, these so-called “good old methods” often outperform sophisticated dashboards in reliability, because they test what truly matters: whether the brand has secured a place in the customer’s memory.
Let’s be honest about what we’re actually measuring:
What’s on the dashboard | What’s happening in reality | The question a leader should be asking |
|---|---|---|
“100K impressions” | The user forgets the brand in 5 minutes | “What stuck in their memory after the touchpoint?” |
“+30% reach” | No growth in brand search queries | “Who’s searching for us by name?” |
“CTR up” | No repeat visits | “Who came back the second time?” |
And here’s where the brand awareness vs real reach conflict shows up. The dashboard does a fine job of logging the contact, but says nothing about whether the brand actually stuck in the user’s head. It’s like a DevOps scenario: the monitoring lights are all green, while the users are filing complaints. Because metrics alone are not equal to user experience.
CMOs and marketers are used to measuring efficiency with impressions and clicks. Investors want fast numbers for their reports. Early-stage founders take any movement as a win. But all of them fall back on the same line: “Without reach, the funnel won’t even start.” True, you need an entry point. But if reach has no roots in brand awareness, it’s uptime without SLOs: the system looks “alive,” yet provides no business value.
The real work of a CTO, and anyone else who signs off on those dashboards, is to think not in terms of raw reach, but in terms of sustainable brand SLOs, where awareness isn’t a byproduct, but a measurable asset.
There is another layer that is rarely discussed. In an enterprise environment, reach and awareness metrics should not be considered in isolation, but in conjunction with financial indicators. When a CMO brings a graph showing “reach growth” to a CTO, the first question should be: how does this affect LTV/CAC? If there is no brand search, retention, or organic traffic, then awareness remains a phantom. In engineering terms, it's like a test without assert: there was a process, but no result. True maturity begins where marketing metrics intersect with business SLOs.
Vanity metrics are not the real enemy. The danger lies in how leadership interprets them. Reach shows a pulse; brand awareness proves whether the organism is alive. But in boardrooms, these signals often get split: CMOs talk impressions, CTOs talk uptime, investors ask for growth — and no one aligns the story.
For a business, this misalignment is fatal. If reach doesn’t translate into brand search, retention, or an improved LTV/CAC ratio, then it’s not growth — it’s just a prettier report. And when a dashboard becomes the only evidence of progress, teams end up managing numbers instead of building equity.
The strategic task is clear: treat every “+30% reach” as an open question — what memory did it leave, what revenue path did it shape, what cohort did it strengthen? Only by connecting these dots will reach stop being a vanity metric and start working as an asset.
