Impressions vs. Views: Understanding Views and Impressions in Digital Marketing

Perhaps your company is working toward building better brand awareness. And you’re also implementing various strategies to grow and influence your audience on social networks. However, there’s one thing you need to know to make sense of how your efforts are doing: the difference between impressions vs. views.

As a marketer, you’ll often come across these two terms. However, it’s not always clear what makes both these metrics so important. We all know the importance of PPC. You need to be able to measure your metrics and find areas that need improvement when it comes to developing a digital marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll take a look at what views and impressions are and how they are different.

What are Views?

Views are the number of times visitors watch or engage with your digital content, especially your video ads.

For TrueView in-stream ads running on YouTube, paid ad views on the video are counted as public views when one of the following happens:

• Somebody watches a full ad that’s 11 to 30 seconds long.
• Somebody watches at least 30 seconds of an ad that’s more than 30 seconds long.
• Somebody interacts with the ad.

 
For TrueView discovery ads running on YouTube, paid ad views on a video are counted as public views when somebody clicks the ad, and the video starts to play.

To define a video view, you have to determine the minimum length of a video ad that the audience should watch for the campaign to be considered a success. For instance, suppose you want visitors to watch 30 seconds of a 45-second ad. Only then you can accurately compare and analyze different vendors, items, or assets to determine the most effective one.

But what if you don’t define the minimum length at the beginning?

You won’t be able to aptly judge the ad performance if you start comparing vendors who all use completely different definitions of a video view.

Every vendor possibly uses a unique approach to define video views, so ensure you are aware of each vendor’s methodology before you begin analyzing the performance and shifting budgets around. You may also find that you’re perhaps misinterpreting the outcomes and not spending budget as effectively as possible.

 

What are Impressions?

Impressions are when an ad or any other kind of digital content renders on a person’s screen. In Google Ads They aren’t action-based metrics and are just defined by a visitor possibly seeing the ad.

Impressions are a commonly used metric to measure the performance of most kinds of online advertising campaign, such as:

• How often a pay-per-click ad appeared for relevant search queries
• Number of times a meme appears on social media
• Access to visual or graphical assets through third-party sites, such as Pinterest or Google Image Search.

 

Types of Impressions

Theoretically considering, impressions can be divided into two types:

Served Impressions

The existing standard for tracking online impressions is based on served content. Whenever a marketing-related file is accessed and transmitted, this activity is counted as an impression. It’s easier to track this activity as it depends on pure server data to calculate the impressions.

However, counting impressions based on served content has a problem. It is tough to tell how much influence the content had without more in-depth data analysis. Moreover, in some instances, users can access the files without being able to view them. Consequently, ecommerce companies buying impression-based ads like display ads are focusing on adopting more accurate systems for measuring impressions.

There’s a strong need for a new viewable impressions standard that can address this issue.

Viewable Impressions

The viewable impressions metric uses data collected from a customer’s device to improve the impression count by eliminating instances where, in all likelihood, the digital media was not seen.

Viewable impression tracking can detect user behaviors which restrict ad viewing, such as:

• Ad-blocking software.
• Screen resolutions too small for the ad to appear on screen.
• People were scrolling down before the requested ad loads.
• Broken plugins are restricting content display.
• Mobile incompatibilities exist, such as desktop-only sites.
• The user minimized browser windows.
• User movement between different applications.
• Pages loaded in background tabs then never accessed.
• Non-user interference, such as malware cloaking ads.

 

 

Tracking viewable impressions has two major benefits.

Firstly, you receive more accurate info on the number of actual impressions.

Secondly, the data you gather is highly actionable and suggests enhancements, which can ensure higher rates of content delivery.

Impressions vs. Reach

Many people confuse impressions with reach. Reach calculates the number of unique visitors who view your digital media. Whereas, impressions track any time the content appears, even if this occurs several times for the same visitor.

For instance, if you post an article to your 1,000 followers on social media, your reach would be a maximum of 1,000, even if one of your followers sees the article again from a friend sharing the same post. On the other hand, your impressions will increase every time somebody sees your post, even if they’ve seen it before.

There comes the concept of unique impressions as well. The unique impressions measure the total number of unique users who see your ad. This metric goes beyond the basic cookie-cutter measurement to help you know the number of people who saw your ad across different devices, formats, websites, apps, and networks.

If somebody views your advertisement on their mobile, their desktop, and their tablet, your ad will receive three impressions. However, unique impressions can tell you that each of those impressions came from one visitor (i.e., your ad reached a single person three different times).

To track unique impressions, consider tracking these metrics:

• Unique users
• Average impressions per user (frequency)

 

 

How to Calculate Unique Impressions

To measure unique impressions, Google Ads uses statistical models that track user behavior across many browsers and devices. These models are formed by monitoring anonymous user behavior across different Google products to determine cross-device usage patterns.

Google Ads takes behavior observations into account alongside other indicators and local inputs (like census and Customer Barometer surveys). In doing so, the platform can avoid duplicate counts of users across sessions, formats, networks, and devices. The final outcome is the number of unique users who viewed an ad.

Impressions vs. Views: Key Metrics to Measure

Impressions

• Impressions – You can check the number of times your ad was shown to the user.
• Impression share – It measures the percentage of impressions that your advertisement gets compared to the total number of impressions that your ad could receive. You can even investigate why you are getting less impression share.
• Search top impression rate – Search top impression rate “Impr. (Top) %” is the percent of your ad impressions that are shown anywhere above the organic search results.
• Search absolute top impression rate- Search absolute top impression rate “Impr. (Abs.Top) %” is the percent of your ad impressions that are shown as the very first ad above the organic search results.
• Search absolute top impression share – It measures the impressions you get in the absolute top location (the very first ad above the organic search results) divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to get in the top position.
• Search top impression share – It measures the impressions you receive in the top location (anywhere above the organic search results, e.g. position 2, 3 or 4) divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to get in the top location.
• Search lost absolute top impression share (budget) – It measures how often your ad is not at the absolute top (i.e. position 1) because of a low budget.
• Search lost top impression share (budget) – It estimates how often your ad does not appear anywhere above the organic search results because of a low budget.
• Search lost absolute top impression share (rank) – It measures how often your ad is not at the absolute top because of poor Ad Rank.
• Search lost top impression share (rank) – It measures how often your ad does not appear anywhere above the organic search results because of poor Ad Rank.

 

Views

• View rate – It measures the number of views or engagements your video ad gets divided by the number of times your ad is displayed (video and thumbnail impressions).
• Average CPV – It is the average amount you pay when a user watches thirty seconds of your video (or the complete duration if it is shorter than thirty seconds) or engages with your video ad, whichever occurs first. Keep in mind that your average CPV may not be the same as your maximum CPV, which is the most you’re ready to pay for a video ad view.
• Watch time – It estimates the total amount of time (in seconds) users watched your video ads.
• Average watch time/impression – It estimates the average number of seconds a user watched your video ad per impression of the ad.

 

 

Using Impressions and Views in Your Marketing Strategy

Now that you understand the key differences between impressions vs. views, it’s time to look beyond the definitions and explore what they mean for your marketing strategy.

Knowing your audience

An increase in impressions results in increased awareness. As a company, it’s critical to extend your reach to as many customers as possible. However, even if you’re reaching thousands of users, it’s of no use if only a few hundred of them are interested in your business. So, design messages as well as your marketing strategy with your target customers in mind. Moreover, track all the content that is being shared, retweeted, liked, or replied to online. When you track these engagements, you will be able to find potential customers to target. Eventually, you will extend your reach.

Relevancy

Impressions measure your ability to put your content in front of your target audience. When your impressions increase, that’s perhaps because of your content showing up more frequently into people’s feeds. However, if your content is not relevant to your ad, then it may result in low views for your campaign.

Wrap Up

Despite the ever-fluctuating reporting processes of internet marketers, some things hold true. One of them is that evaluating a range of quality data is a great way to create an informed marketing strategy.

Now that you have a better understanding of what impressions and views are and how they are significant in digital marketing, it’s time to incorporate them into your campaign evaluations.

Check your ad views and impressions the next time you launch a Google Ad. Who knows? It might provide you with the insights you need to boost your clickthrough-rate (CTR).