The definition of impressions is when an advertisement or any other form of digital media is rendered on a user’s screen. Impressions are not action-based and are merely defined by a user potentially seeing the advertisement, making CPM campaigns ideal for businesses intent on spreading brand awareness.
Impressions In Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has made impression tracking significantly more quantitative than offline advertising. For example, a billboard owner has no concrete way of estimating the number of impressions his platform grants advertisers. Impression-based online campaigns, on the other hand, can measure impressions concretely and are generally sold in terms of cost-per-thousand (CPM) impressions.
Impression tracking is a common metric for measuring the performance of most types of online marketing campaigns, including:
- Pay-per-click impressions, measured against actual clicks
- Number of times a meme appears on social media
- On-site views of internal calls-to-action
- Access to graphic materials through third-party sites, such as Pinterest or Google Image Search
Impressions generally come in two forms: served and viewable.
Served Impressions
The current standard for tracking online impressions is based on served content: whenever a marketing-related file is accessed and transmitted that activity counts as an impression. This is extremely easy to track as it relies on pure server data to count the impressions.
Counting impressions based on served content still has the ‘billboard’ problem, in that it’s difficult to tell how much impact the content had without deeper data analysis. Also, in some cases, files can be accessed without being viewable by the consumer.
As a result, ecommerce businesses purchasing impression-based advertising such as display ads have urged the adoption of more accurate systems for measuring impressions. The new viewable impressions standard seeks to address this need.
Viewable Impressions
The viewable impressions method uses data gathered from a user’s device to refine the impression count by excluding cases where, in all likelihood, the content was not seen.
Viewable impression tracking can identify user behaviour which prevents ad viewing, including:
- Ad-blocking software
- Screen resolutions are too small for the ad to appear onscreen.
- Users scrolling down before the requested ad has loaded.
- Broken plug-ins preventing content display.
- Mobile incompatibilities such as desktop-only websites.
- Minimised browser windows.
- User movement between different applications.
- Pages loaded in background tabs then never accessed.
- Non-user interference, like malware cloaking ad
The benefits of viewable impression tracking are twofold. First, a company receives more accurate information on the number of actual impressions made. Secondly, the data collected is highly actionable and suggests improvements which can ensure greater rates of content delivery.
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Why impressions require commercial context
An impression records exposure, not attention, intent or incremental revenue. Ecommerce retailers therefore need to separate visibility from the individual decisions that produce a purchase. A rising impression count may accompany growth, but it can also reflect repeated exposure to people who were never likely to buy. Useful measurement joins exposure to identifiable behaviour, subsequent product interest and completed transactions while preserving a credible comparison with what would otherwise have happened.
For SwiftERM, the operational question is not how many times a message appeared. It is whether first-party behavioural and transaction evidence enabled a more relevant SKU and timing decision for a particular customer, and whether that decision generated attributable additional turnover.
