Impressions: Your Guide to Advertising’s Most Used Term

As a full-service digital advertising agency in Phoenix, the term ‘impression’ is one of the more common words you’ll hear around our office. For non-media types, impression has a totally different definition; for my digital team, impression is the foundational metric that agencies and media providers use to measure their audience delivery performance. 

That being said, I wonder how many people outside of our office actually understand what an impression is. 

In simple terms, an impression is a count of how many times a piece of content is displayed. If we have anything to do with it, that piece of content is your advertising message. 

There, you can stop reading now and consider yourself smarter than you were when you woke up. 

However, there is much more to an impression beyond the definition. Let’s dig in. 

ARE IMPRESSIONS THE MOST IMPORTANT METRIC IN ADVERTISING?

Now that we know what an impression is, let’s talk about what it’s not. An impression does not take into account any action on the part of the recipient. Candidly, it doesn’t even gauge whether the ad was even paid attention to. 

At ReThinc, we don’t see that as problematic. What we (and our clients) are looking for is a number that allows us to measure the deliverables. Once we establish the cumulative number of impressions that a platform delivers, we then use this thing we call math to calculate the cost per thousand. (Go Devils!) This allows us to gauge the efficacy of a particular advertising platform’s ability to deliver audiences. 

Impression calculations and analysis vary by platform. For instance, billboard advertising impressions are different from impressions generated by a website visit or an email. Having some level of expertise to analyze across multiple platforms is just one reason why we’re good at negotiating solid CPM’s for our clients. 

WHAT ARE OTHER MEDIA TERMS THAT CLIENTS SHOULD KNOW?

Impressions help us to evaluate a campaign and the efficacy of the platforms used to execute it. When building brand awareness, impressions are important, but there are other things we look at to see if, in fact, our clients are getting what they need from their investment.  

Reach is defined as the actual number of people your content was served to. You see, in advertising, you can create multiple impressions (frequency) with a singular (unique) person. So reach will always be lower than your impression count. Reach is critical to a campaign’s success. 

Views are similar to impressions but require a specific length of time for engagement. Views are highly relevant to video content. Calculating this metric allows us to evaluate the level of interest a particular impression will have in our content. Views tell us we’re reaching the right audience.

Clicks or Conversion is when a person who has been exposed to your content takes action. So, when someone is exposed to your content and calls you, fills out a contact form, or clicks on the content to get more information, we call that a conversion. These are VERY important in the world of campaign analysis. This tells us the ad is working and generating the response we intended it to have. 

Impression analysis is important, but complex. For advertisers, impression calculations and other industry terms can be confusing. Impressions always seem to be high for most campaigns, but your engagement and response rates are the key factors that your ad agency should be evaluating. Your agency should be taking steps when impression counts are high and conversion numbers are low. 

Understanding the terminology is just one part of the analysis process. We want our clients (and Steve) to know what specific advertising terms mean so they can better understand what we are doing with their investment.

If you would like to learn more about how we evaluate an ad campaign, ReThinc Advertising can help. Contact me at ed.olsen@rethincadvertising.com or give me a call at 602.284.6722.