Ad impressions

If you're a marketer, chances are that you use Google Ads or another online ad tool to get important metrics about the number of impressions your ad campaigns are getting over a certain period of time.

TRACK YOUR AD IMPRESSIONS

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Templates using this KPI
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Integrations using this KPI

What are ad impressions?

An ad impression is the number of times your ad is shown on a search result page or other site on the Google Network. Each time your ad appears on Google or the Google Network, it's counted as one impression. The functionality of ad impressions is basically to know how many potential eyeballs you can have on your online ad.

Here are a few other definitions :

Viewable impressions: For display ads and videos, your ad is counted as viewable when at least 50% of its area is visible on the screen for at least 1 second. For large display ads formats of 242,500 pixels or more, the ad is counted as viewable when at least 30% of it’s area is visible for at least 1 second.

Served impressions: An impression is counted when an ad is sent (or "served") to a publisher by the ad server. The ad creative may or may not be downloaded to the user’s device, rendered, or viewed by the user.

The impression count can be used in your marketing campaign to know how many eyeballs have the potential of seeing your PPC ad. However, always take into consideration non-human traffic and interactions caused by bots.

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How do you calculate ad impressions

Ad impressions are very useful in online advertising but need to be tracked alongside other metrics such as click-through-rate (CTR), cost per mille (CPM), and the traffic of your piece of content to have any value at all.

To check your ad impressions in Google Analytics, just go to Behavior > Events > Overview. As long as ad impressions are tracked, you should see Advanced Ads in the Event Category list.

What are good ad impressions

As with a lot of digital marketing campaigns and digital advertising, it all depends on the keywords your targeting, but most importantly, your click-through rate. It’s better to have a good CTR on an ad with a little less traffic, than thousands of impressions on an ad with a very bad CTR.

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What are bad ad impressions?

Same goes here, a bad number of impressions would be impressions without any clicks. Also if you’ve got no impressions at all, or a very high cpc it’s not very good either. Make sure there are no issues with your ads that needs some fixes or optimization.

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Ad impressions best practices

To get a high number of users, which increased the number of pageviews, here are some of the best practices you should keep in mind :

Track it alongside other metrics

Make sure to track your ad impressions alongside other metrics to have a birds-eye view of your overall ad performance.

Determine the number of impressions needed to attain your goals

With your CTR in mind as well as your traffic goals, determine how many impressions you’d need to attain your goals. You can then put on the right amount of effort into specific keywords that’ll help you attain your goals.