For schools where you need a merit scholarship to be able to afford to attend, your goal is the merit scholarship, not merely acceptance. Acceptance without the needed scholarship is the same as rejection.
However, there is usually less public information that can be used to estimate reach/match/safety for competitive merit scholarships (i.e. those which are not automatic based on stats or NM status) than for admission to colleges. So most competitive merit scholarships should probably be estimated as reaches, even if admission to the school may be seen as a match or safety.
Of course, those where both admission and the needed merit scholarships are awarded automatically based on criteria that you have (e.g. GPA, test scores, NM status) can be seen as safeties.