What Is an Impression in Online Advertising, How to Count Them

What Is an Impression?

An impression is a metric used to quantify the number of digital views or engagements of a piece of content, usually an advertisement, digital post, or web page. Impressions are also referred to as an "ad view." They are used in online advertising, which often pays on a per-impression basis. Counting impressions is essential to how web advertising is accounted for and paid for in search engine marketing, as well as measuring the performance of social media campaigns. Impressions are not a measure of whether an advertisement has been clicked on, but how many times it was displayed or had potential "eyeballs" on it, which leads to some debate as to how accurate the metric is.

How Impressions Work

Broadly, one impression is equal to each occurrence of a web page, ad, or piece of content being found and loaded. Because it is accessible to both measure and understand, it has become the most convenient and economical way to determine whether an advertisement is being seen or not. But exactly how that figure is interpreted is up for debate. Some online advertising experts believe that there is no exact way to count impressions since a count can be skewed by a single person registering the same ad in several page views, for example. There are several more ways for total impression numbers to be skewed, which leads to advertisers to view any impression figure with a bit of skepticism. In general, most advertisers and publishers decide beforehand how impressions are counted and accounted for. Advertisers may decide on whether a campaign is successful or not based on another form of reporting, such as engagement (broadly, how an ad viewer interacts with an ad).

Impression Accounting

Frequently, impressions are measured by cost per mille (CPM), where mille refers to 1,000 impressions (or cost per thousand). A banner ad might have a CPM of $5, meaning that the website owner receives $5 every time an ad on his website is displayed 1,000 times.

The owner of a website may be paid for each ad impression. Other advertising arrangements may only pay the website owner when a visitor clicks on the ad, or clicks on the ad and makes a purchase. Typically, advertisers pay less for an ad campaign based solely on impressions and more for campaigns based on click-throughs and conversions. The reason for this difference in pay rates is that an ad that causes its viewer to take action resulting in a sale is more valuable to the advertiser than one that does not. Still, impressions are useful when running public relations campaigns that are designed to build an image or create awareness about a company or product.

The exact way impressions are counted is somewhat technical. Ad servers provide a barely visible image (or "pixel") that can be found on each publisher page. When a page with that pixel image loads, an impression is made.

Impression Fraud

Several things can skew impression counts. For one, estimates have that around 60% of all web traffic is from bots. Impression counts make no distinction between a human ad viewer or a bot. Ads can also fail to load, or the incorrect ad may load. Such errors may or may not be accounted for. There is also outright fraud, with unscrupulous website developers using several methods to game the system (one estimate is that a quarter of the online advertising market is fraudulent). Nonetheless, impressions remain a popular way to measure engagement, whether in advertising, social media, or analyzing web traffic.