Good impressions matter all the time — not only when you first meet someone in person. Although an impression is one of the most common marketing terms, many executives cannot define it. Marketers also struggle with explaining how to measure and analyze impressions — especially since they can be tricky to track.
While marketing impressions may seem confusing, once you understand them you’ll be able to recognize how you reach your audience and where you can improve your business strategy.
In this guide, you’ll learn these must-know details about impressions:
- What they are
- How to evaluate them
- Served impressions versus viewable impressions
- Why evaluating them matters
What are impressions?
To help visualize impressions, let’s start with an example. Imagine you’re advertising for a new restaurant with a billboard. Hundreds of people drive past the billboard every day — getting the chance to see your ad many times over and over. Others might pass it only once while taking a road trip or exploring a new route.
A marketing impression is defined as the number of opportunities people have to view your campaign. So, using our billboard illustration, the impressions would be how many times people passed the sign — regardless of how often they drove by it or even glanced at the ad.
Although it would be difficult to count the number of cars passing a physical billboard, tracking impressions for online campaigns is almost effortless with marketing software options. In the digital world, impressions usually describe how often content appears on a user’s screen or feed.
Impressions aren’t the same as engagement or reach. While impressions indicate the possibility of customers viewing an ad, engagement and reach concentrate on actual views or interactions.
Reach represents the number of unique people who look at your content. In our example, the sign’s reach would include the total individuals who looked at the ad. If a person saw your sign on multiple drives, they would only count once toward the overall reach.
On the other hand, engagement focuses on meaningful customer interactions that build a relationship with your company. For the billboard, this would include the number of calls from people who contacted the restaurant using the reservation phone number listed on your ad.
In social media, engagement often includes likes, comments, shares, or clicks, while reach shows the number of people who saw your content on their screens or feeds.
Impressions can be difficult to measure and assess — even with technology. Apps may not always be able to track whether marketing assets or web pages have loaded fully. Ad-blocking software might prevent people from seeing your content altogether.
Although you can’t track conversions perfectly with impressions, they provide valuable feedback about how users may see your ads and the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
How to evaluate impressions
Now that you have a basic knowledge of impressions, let’s check out how to use them to understand campaign performance.
Since we don’t measure impressions through clicks or interactions, think of them as potential views. For example, let’s say 200 people saw your company’s Facebook ad. The ad was displayed 300 times, with some people seeing it more than once and others scrolling past it. Although your ad reached 200 people, you would have 300 impressions since users had that many chances combined to see your asset.
Many marketers define the role of impressions in a campaign’s success before launching an ad. It’s crucial to use many metrics to gauge campaign performance accurately. Depending on your goals, you should evaluate impressions alongside data like reach and engagement to get the whole picture.
Served impressions
You can track impressions in a few different ways. The examples so far describing potential views are called served impressions. They are the current standard for measuring content delivered on a web page.
Like a physical billboard, it can be difficult to track exactly how many people had the chance to see an online ad. It can also be hard to determine an asset’s impact without analyzing additional data. Many marketers have pushed for a more precise benchmark to measure impressions.