Impressions is a metric that shows how many times an ad is seen by users. Impressions in marketing help estimate the number of times an ad is viewed.
What are impressions in ad statistics
A display ad occurs when a user sees the ad on a smartphone or desktop screen. One ad view equals one impression.
Ad impressions – this is one of the indicators for analysis of promotion. Most often, this is not the key metric for evaluating the effectiveness of advertising. It can be used in conjunction with another metric – the number of clicks. The ratio of the number of clicks to impressions allows you to calculate the clickability of ads, which shows how much the ad interested the user.
You can see the number of impressions in the statistics of any site’s advertising cabinet. The number is displayed in a separate column “impressions”.
Displayed impressions in payment for advertising
The impressions are also used in payment for advertising. Based on impressions, the CPM (Cost per Mille – price per 1000 impressions) payment model works. Using this model, the advertiser pays per 1000 impressions of an ad. Each ad impression is fixed, regardless of whether the user clicked on it.
The CPM model is more commonly used in media, video and programmatic advertising. These types of advertising are used when the advertiser needs to reach as large an audience as possible, talk about the brand, product, promotion, increase campaign awareness, etc.
When an advertising system counts impressions
The rules by which the advertising system determines that a display has occurred:
- Each ad impression is counted regardless of the number of unique users. That is, if the same user viewed the ad three times, three displays will be counted, not one.
- The same user who is part of the target audience, ads can be shown an unlimited number of times, if you do not limit the frequency of displays in the settings. It is recommended to limit the number of impressions for one user – this will save the budget and do not annoy people with intrusive advertising.
- Usually the display is counted if the ad is shown, but there are nuances.
- Display search ads are set off if the user entered a query in the search box and opened the output. It does not matter whether he dolestalnosti to the block with the ad. Thus, the display can be counted even if the user has not actually seen the ad.
- For TrueView In-Stream ads in Google Ads, the ad impression is counted if the user viewed the ad till the end, watched it for more than 30 seconds or interacted with it, that is clicked. For TrueView Video Discovery ads in Google Ads, the show counts if the viewer clicks on the video ad and starts watching it.