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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. Remember, keyword research is the core of your marketing strategy and it would be #1 step that would boost your business. You can do this in your Google Chrome browser seamlessly.
In this article, we’ll take a look at what views and impressions are and how they are different.
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:
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.
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:
Theoretically considering, impressions can be divided into two types:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
An increase in impressions results in increased brand 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 go-to-market 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.
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.
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 CTR.
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