What are impressions?
Impressions are a measurement of the number of times a specific piece of content—typically an advertisement, digital post, or web page—is viewed by users. It counts as an impression if the content loads or appears on a page.
Impressions in digital marketing can refer to anything that appears on a digital platform, including emails, advertisements, social media posts, and blog posts.
Monitoring the number of impressions is a useful way to determine whether marketing strategies are succeeding. A campaign is considered successful if it receives a high number of impressions and has a high conversion rate. Low impressions and conversion rates for a campaign may indicate that techniques need to be reviewed or altered.
Remember that impression data might be affected by a visitor’s page views, therefore it’s crucial to note that entire marketing campaigns shouldn’t be adjusted based on impressions alone.
Impressions vs. clicks
An impression simply is the display of an advertisement to the user. When a user clicks on the advertisement, it is considered to have been engaged with or clicked on. Although engagements ultimately have a higher value, impressions are still crucial data for marketers and advertisers.
Measurement of impressions
There are two ways to measure online impressions:
Served impressions
Served impressions are counted when a piece of content, frequently an advertisement, has loaded for the user. These impressions may also include times when users didn’t see the advertisement because they had ad blockers enabled or weren’t looking at the page’s relevant section.
Viewable impressions
The viewable impressions approach leverages user-provided (data from the user’s device) data to refine the impression count by removing instances (such as ad blockers, broken plugins, small screen resolutions, pages loading in the background, etc.) when it is very likely that the content was not viewed. Viewable impression monitoring has two advantages:
- Businesses get more precise data on the number of real impressions produced.
- The data gathered is extremely useful and offers suggestions for enhancements that might guarantee higher percentages of content distribution.
Impressions on different social platforms
Numerous platforms provide impression totals for various categories of content. Divided by type of content, platforms quantify and represent your web impressions in the following ways:
Social media impressions
Most social media platforms count the impressions as views, unlike Facebook, which monitors impressions differently.
The three impression categories on Facebook are viral, paid, and organic. Paid impressions capture views for your Facebook paid posts, organic impressions record views for your organic posts, and viral impressions track views from other people sharing your content.
Your ad’s served and viewed impression totals are also provided by Facebook Ads.
PPC impressions
PPC (Pay-per-click) is an online marketing technique whereby advertisers pay a publishing website when the advertisement is clicked. In addition to appearing on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, PPC advertisements can appear at the top of a SERP when a term matches the advertiser’s keyword list.
PPC impressions refer to the impressions counted in paid advertisements.
Standard impression count can be tracked along with several related measures, such as:
Impression percentage
Google Ads provides you with two impression percentage counts that show how many of your overall impressions were in the top spot or any other place just above organic search results.
Impression share
It is the percentage of the number of impressions your adverts acquire to all the impressions they may get.
Website impressions
Through tools like Google Analytics, you can also keep tabs on the impressions that your website receives. These platforms use the following metrics to determine impressions:
Pageviews
The number of views any page of your website receives may be seen in Google Analytics. This measure monitors the number of times your page is seen.
Impressions from organic searches
Google Search Console keeps track of how many times your sites are displayed in organic search results on Google.
Factors influencing impression count
Any analysis of impression measurement needs to take into account the variables that can affect your impression counts and reduce their accuracy.
- Bots may “visit” your content and exaggerate the figures.
- Multiple views by the same user will also be counted by impressions as a single hit. As a result, someone reloading a page or viewing the same information shared repeatedly could give you several impressions.
- Ad blockers enabled on the browser can lead to duplication of views.
- Inappropriate placement of the ads can lead to users missing viewing ads repeatedly.
These apparent “duplicate” views may be beneficial because repetition can improve the impact of your messaging. However, you should probably track reach if you want to know how many individuals view your content.
Why is there a need to track impressions?
Tracking impressions may help your digital marketing strategy and guide your actions, despite its limitations.
Impressions are a useful measure to monitor if raising brand recognition is one of your marketing objectives. These figures, when combined with reach, will show you how frequently your brand’s message is seen by potential target buyers.
Additionally, impressions are a useful supplementary indicator for other campaign objectives, such as:
PPC advertising
For PPC advertisements, you could keep track of every impression and click. You may need to re-optimize your ad for conversions if it has a low click-through rate (CTR) but a high impression percentage, which indicates that Google is constantly delivering your ad in the top place.
Social media
Users need to see your social media content in their newsfeeds for it to be effective. Monitoring impressions will allow you to keep tabs on how many people are viewing your posts, and engagement metrics will allow you to determine whether or not they are engaging with your content.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
By monitoring your impressions in Google Search Console, you may evaluate your SEO performance. To get an accurate picture of how well your pages are performing, you should also track the ratio of impressions to clicks you get. This will allow you to determine your CTR and other pertinent conversion metrics.
Tracking impressions and other metrics rely entirely on the marketing objectives. For optimal outcomes, each business and campaign will need a different set of measurements.
How to increase impressions
It is possible to identify areas for development when you start keeping note of your impressions. If so, look over these simple suggestions to improve and boost your impressions:
Boost engagement
The goal of any platform, from social media to search engines, is to provide consumers with content they enjoy. To receive more impressions from platforms, measure your engagement and concentrate on techniques to raise those metrics.
Publish tailored content
The creation of customized content is among the finest strategies to increase engagement. Make use of your advertising platform’s targeting options and focus on making your content more audience-relevant by optimizing it for those keywords.
Conduct A/B tests
Test your advertising and social media content to see which type and format of content attract the most response and impressions if you want real-time statistics to guide your selections.
Raise bids and ad quality
Your bid amount and ad quality both have an impact on how Google Advertisements decide which ads to display. By enhancing these components, discover how to optimize your PPC advertising for impressions and raise your Google Ads Quality Score.
Adhere to SEO best practices
Emphasize SEO, including technical, on-page, and off-page SEO, if you want to boost the number of organic search impressions.
Conclusion
Impressions are a reliable data point that may assist you in better understanding other areas of your marketing statistics and evaluating marketers’ efforts to enable you to create a more specialized strategic plan.
