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Reach Lift
Reach lift is the incremental net reach a plan gains when a new channel is added, measured as the difference between the deduplicated reach of the combined plan and the deduplicated reach of the original plan alone. It isolates the audience the new channel adds who were not already reached, not its standalone reach.
Formula
Worked example
A TV plan alone reaches 62% net reach (1+) of a 5,000,000-adult target, i.e. 3,100,000 people. Adding a YouTube campaign lifts combined deduplicated reach to 71%, or 3,550,000 people. Reach lift = 71% − 62% = 9 percentage points, equal to 450,000 incremental people, a 14.5% relative gain over the TV-only base. That 450,000 is the number that has to justify the YouTube line item in the budget, not YouTube's own reported reach of however many million.
How it is used
Planners use reach lift to defend adding a channel to a plan already at TV saturation, and to compare candidate add-on channels against each other on the same base. The common mistake is calculating it by adding the new channel's standalone reach to the base reach without deduplicating overlap, which overstates the lift because people reached by both channels get counted twice.
The common mistake
Reach lift must come from deduplicated cross-media reach of base-plus-channel minus base alone, not from adding the new channel's standalone reach on top of the base.