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What are Impressions?

We speak of impressions when a user sees certain elements on his screen, i.e. when a visual contact is established. From the generated clicks and the number of impressions, one can then calculate another important value, the click-through rate.

  • Is suitable for assessing advertising performance
  • Is an important variable in web analysis
  • May affect advertisements, text or links

The meaning of impressions

Visual contacts with advertising banners, AdWords ads or simply text are understood as impressions. For example, Google AdWords tells the advertiser how often ads for certain search terms have been shown. Webmasters can use their Google Search Console to obtain information about important values such as impressions, clicks and thus also the click-through rate. The latter shows how often an ad has been clicked in relation to the ads displayed. Impressions are used, among other things, to evaluate the advertising performance of various elements. Page impressions are visual contacts or page impressions of HTML documents with an Internet browser. If page impressions are registered, they are not assigned to special users. A visitor can call up several web pages and also generate several page impressions. Because page impressions do not allow clear statements to be made about specific user behaviour and because this is more of a quantitative analysis, however, for qualitative analyses such significant measurement variables as unique users or visitors are preferred as the basis for traffic evaluations. When users click on (AdWords) ads, an impression becomes a visit or a page view. Such clicks increase the click-through rate. Also, every display of advertising banners generally counts as an impression.

Impressions as meaningful and measurable metrics

For the evaluation of a website (and its contents) the impressions play an important role. In the digital advertising world, a distinction is usually made between ad impressions and page impressions. The latter are sometimes also referred to as page views. Page impressions (PI) refer both to web pages and their sub-pages. Since a unique user can trigger several impressions, the key figure PI should not be confused with unique visits. Impressions are already a good indicator of how popular an online presence is or how well visited the page is. Page impressions are also used to determine the thousand contact price (CPM) for advertising bookings. Ad impressions are also an important factor in online marketing. Here, on the other hand, one refers to any visual contact and the insertion of advertisements. These are usually located on ad servers and are also logged there. Because on the Internet, billing is often done by CPM, this type is particularly important because 1000 ad impressions are paid per 1000. In general, advertisers receive statistics on all impressions from the operator after the end of an advertising campaign. Together with other key figures, e.g. the clicks made on the advertising media (e.g. a banner) as well as the resulting actions, a clear picture of the success is determined. For example, as already mentioned, the click-through rate (CTR) can be calculated. In the advertising network of the large provider Google, impressions play an important role. They are a fixed quantity in the cost model CPM (Cost per Mile(, which can be selected for the placement of ads. They can also be used in other billing models for the evaluation of success. With the CPC (Cost per Click), for example, an insight can be gained into the number of impressions an ad needed to be clicked on

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