Don't Get the Wrong Impression About Impressions

“Impressions.”

The word is easy on the ear. It flows beautifully and sounds impressive when throwing it around in a report for those who don’t understand web metrics.

But don’t let it fool you. Impressions are not nearly as useful as they may sound to the untrained ear. In short, the number of impressions refers to the number of times a piece of content was delivered to users browsers (Reed College of Media, 2013.)

Think of it like when television networks tout the number of viewers for any given program. While the number may sound impressive, it doesn’t tell the whole story. If 1 million people are “viewing” the channel, what good is it to the company if half of those “viewers” are using the show as background noise, another quarter of them are paying more attention to their mobile device, a handful of them simply left the TV on when they left the room, and a handful are not even human entities, but instead bots of some sort? No good at all, that’s what.

Impressions are similar - a high impressions count does not equal high audience reach. What good is it to know the number of impressions if it isn’t correlated with customers actually taking the desired action? A high number of impressions means absolutely nothing if it doesn’t drive customers to act and, ultimately, generate revenue for the company (Tuschman, 2013.)

The marketing strategy should not just be to blast your site to anyone and everyone (Tuschman, 2013.) No, like any effective marketing objective, strategy or tactic, considering the true audience is key. It would be far better to have 100 impressions with a 50% conversion rate than it would be to have 1000 impressions with a 1.2% conversion rate. You don’t need all the people - you need the RIGHT people. In other words, the number of people you’ve impressed is far more important than the number of impressions you receive!

That’s where effective SEO comes in. The use of appropriate and specific keywords can help marketers reach a very specific audience with a very specific interest or problem to solve (Tuschman, 2013.) 

This isn’t to say that impressions are completely pointless - of course generating traffic to your site is important! After all, getting your site onto users’ browsers is mandatory to achieve any other intended goals.

Here’s a timely example. When dangerous wintery conditions keep people inside for great lengths of time, they tend to spend more time online, which means more impressions for all kinds of websites. While many potential customers use this extra time to merely window shop (which does not count as a conversion for retailers,) some actually act and take advantage of on-demand delivery services that can keep them from having to go out into the cold. And sometimes, that’s enough to get them hooked and change their habits over the long term (Pressman, 2015.)

Another example of the usefulness of impressions is when they’re used to determine the cost of a campaign (cost per thousand impressions) and the revenue made on a campaign (revenue per thousand impressions.) This makes it possible to compare the earnings rates for different sites regardless of their audience sizes  (Johnston, 2014.)

References:

Johnston, M. (2014.) What are average CPM rates in 2014? Monetize Pros. Retrieved Sunday, January 25 2015 from http://monetizepros.com/blog/2014/average-cpm-rates/#rpmvscpm

Pressman, A. (2015.) Winter storms encourage snuggling up inside, but not much online shopping. Yahoo Finance. Retrieved Tuesday, January 26, 2015 from http://finance.yahoo.com/news/winter-storm-boosts-craigslist-posts-more-than-online-shopping-174855634.html

Reed College of Media. (2013.) Lesson 2: Basic Web Analytics. Retrieved Saturday, January 24, 2015.

Tuschman, J. (2013.) Local business owners, don’t be impression with impressions! Red Spot Interactive. Retrieved Monday, January 26 2015 from http://www.redspotinteractive.com/local-business-owners-dont-be-impressed-with-impressions/