How Will the Number of Impressions Affect My Campaign?

Every instance of your ad being shown on the Internet is called an impression. Each impression represents a potential viewing of your ad by someone. This is your opportunity for the message in your ad to be conveyed. Internet advertising is most commonly bought and sold based on numbers of impressions. For example, when you buy 50,000 impressions, your ad will be shown to your targeted audience 50,000 times.

The Metrics of Impressions

Impressions are generally bought in units of 1,000. Within the advertising industry, this cost is typically expressed as CPM (Cost per thousand impressions). A key measurement used to evaluate campaign performance is ’Click-through’. Generally speaking, a click-through is the act of someone clicking on an ad and then going to a web page for additional information. The current industry average for campaign performance is approximately two clicks for every 1,000 impressions.

Just because someone did not click-through does not mean that your message did not resonate with the customer.  Industry data supports the fact that almost one third of ad-driven conversion events - either a purchase, registration or other marketing objective of an advertiser - happened after ’surfers’ viewed, but did not click on a banner ad. It is important to understand that click-throughs are only one factor to be considered when evaluating the performance of your online ad campaign.