More impressions do not mean more consumers: the hidden cost of constantly chasing the same audience
More impressions do not mean more consumers: the hidden cost of constantly chasing the same audience
More channels, the same audience: the same person can receive ads across multiple channels and be counted several times. The result: brands believe they are reaching more consumers than they actually are.
Faced with this challenge, Amazing Agency is committed to analyzing the complete consumer journey to measure actual reach and identify which impacts reach new audiences. It is the difference between buying impressions and buying growth.
Being present in more channels does not necessarily mean reaching more consumers. In an increasingly fragmented advertising ecosystem, a brand can significantly increase the number of impressions of a campaign while its actual audience does not grow in the same proportion. This is the warning from Amazing Agency, a strategic consultancy specialized in Retail Media, Amazon Ads, and growth measurement, which warns of the risk of confusing greater advertising exposure with a real increase in coverage.
Behind this difference is the relationship between impressions and reach, two metrics that measure different realities. While impressions reflect the volume of ad deliveries, reach indicates the number of distinct people who have been exposed to a campaign.
As a campaign progresses, both variables diverge. Impressions continue to grow while incremental reach decreases, as targeting and optimization criteria direct new impacts toward people already reached.
The effect is accentuated in multichannel strategies. The same consumer can receive advertising from a brand on Amazon, social media, video, or display, and appear counted within the reach of each platform. According to Joaquín Otamendi, CEO of Amazing Agency, "most brands do not have an investment problem, they have an accounting problem: they add up reaches that cannot be added together and make decisions based on an audience much smaller than they think."
Added to this is how algorithms work. When different platforms independently optimize toward conversion or profiles with a high propensity to purchase, they tend to concentrate investment on similar users. As a consequence, a strategy designed to diversify a brand's presence ends up generating the opposite effect: it is designed as diversification and executed as concentration.
The cost of impacting the same consumer over and over again
Advertising frequency is not negative in itself, as repetition is necessary to build recall, consideration, and conversion. However, excessive exposure to the same audience leads to a loss of efficiency. Each additional impression directed at a person already reached has a cost, but contributes less and less value until it reaches a point of saturation. Beyond that, repetition generates rejection, with a symptom any consumer recognizes: continuing to see ads for a product they have already bought.
Added to that loss of efficiency is the opportunity cost: every euro spent on increasing frequency on sufficiently impacted consumers is a euro not used to bring in new audiences, something especially relevant in categories with room to expand their customer base.
When good results hide the problem
The hidden cost, however, is not just the money that is wasted: it is that overexposure makes reports look better. By concentrating investment on users who were already close to buying, metrics like ROAS or CPA improve while the incremental contribution to the business remains flat. The brand not only overspends, but convinces itself that it is spending well.
For this reason, Amazing Agency points out the need to differentiate between efficiency and growth. A campaign can achieve good results by capturing existing demand without truly expanding the customer base. This is where indicators such as incremental reach, New-to-Brand, incremental sales, or Incremental ROAS can help identify what additional growth the investment is actually generating.
The problem of measuring each platform in isolation
Each platform primarily measures its own ecosystem and does not always use the same reference unit: cookies, devices, identified accounts, and even households can be counted. Directly adding these data together overestimates the actual number of consumers reached.
The most costly effect appears in the medium term. Analyzed separately, formats closest to conversion always seem the most profitable because they capture demand that others have generated beforehand. This usually leads to cutting investment at the top of the funnel, and two or three quarters later, conversion formats find less demand to capture.
In contrast, deduplicated measurement makes it possible to count unique people across campaigns, formats, and channels, detecting overlaps and understanding the incremental reach contributed by each new channel. Applying this, however, requires bringing signals from different channels into a common measurement space: it is a matter of data architecture and not just tools. Furthermore, this approach helps analyze how frequency is distributed, preventing average frequency from hiding large differences between lightly exposed users and others who have received numerous impacts.
From the number of impacts to real growth
To identify whether a campaign is truly expanding its audience, Amazing Agency recommends jointly analyzing the evolution of impressions, deduplicated reach, and incremental reach for each channel. If impressions continue to grow while reach stabilizes, the investment is buying repetition, not growth.
Likewise, when facing signs of saturation, brands can also limit frequency across channels, redistributing budget toward audiences not yet reached and adapting messages to the stage of the purchase process. The change, however, must begin directly in planning, moving away from optimizing each campaign or platform in isolation to evaluate the complete consumer journey, connecting reach, frequency, and incrementality with real business results.
Within the Amazon ecosystem, technologies such as Amazon Marketing Cloud make it possible to analyze exposure journeys, sequences, audience overlaps, and New-to-Brand behavior. The tool, however, must be part of a broader measurement architecture and remain at the service of strategy.
As advertising execution becomes automated, this vision gains even more importance. Algorithms can optimize each campaign individually, but that does not guarantee that the overall result is the best for the business. "The challenge is no longer buying more impacts, but stopping payment for those that no longer add value. And that forces us to know which ones add new consumers and which ones only add pressure," Joaquín Otamendi concludes.
About Amazing Agency
Founded in 2018, Amazing Agency is a strategic consultancy specialized in Retail Media, Amazon Ads, Amazon DSP, and AI platform positioning. Since its inception, it has combined strategic vision, data, and technology to drive sustainable growth in Commerce Media ecosystems internationally.
In 2019, Amazon published the agency's first success story on its platform, consolidating the consultancy's early leadership in the channel. Additionally, it was the first Spanish agency recognized as an Amazon Advertising Sales Partner.
Today, it consolidates its position as a Growth Infrastructure Partner, responding to a new market reality: growth is no longer a tactic, it is an infrastructure.
