Ad Impressions (IMPR)

What are Ad Impressions?

Tell me more about this metric

This metric measures the amount of times that a specific ad has been shown to your audience. For a single ad, you can see how many times the ad has shown up on your audience’s screens. Impressions can be measured for search ads, display ads, video ads and almost all other ad formats.

Impressions represent the total number of times your ad has been viewed. That means that if a single person saw your ad 4 times, they would count as 4 impressions. If 4 people saw your ad once, they would also count as 4 impressions.

The number of impressions you receive can vary based on the size of your audience, size of your budget, relevance of your ad, quality score, and a variety of other factors. If you want to increase this metric, it may be as easy as raising your budget or as involved as redesigning all of your ad to be more relevant to the audience.

More advanced digital advertisers will also use impressions across their campaigns and accounts to evaluate their impression share, adjust their bid strategies, and diagnose any problems related to the delivery of their ads.

Example

Suppose you are trying to better understand the performance of an ad campaign that you are running on Google or Facebook. Impressions are a good leading indicator.

You look into your ad account and see that you have been running 4 different ad variations within a campaign.

Ad 1: 16,484 impressions
Ad 2: 10,245 impressions
Ad 3: 9,198 impressions
Ad 4: 435 impressions

This means that Ad 1 is receiving the most impressions. This means that this one has the highest likelihood of being clicked.

What do others say?

Here is how Google defines Ad Impressions. Facebook's definition of Ad Impressions