What Are Impressions — A Social Media Deep Dive

Here’s what the advertising mastermind, David Ogilvy, had to say about testing: “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

He was an adamant believer of testing. He emphasized on its importance multiple times. David even said that “The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST.”

But why am I talking about test a lot? That’s because I’m going to talk about impressions, that are crucial in testing and looking at the results.

As you know, here on the Blue Waves blog, you’ll find all things digital marketing. Whether you want to learn about SEO or social media marketing, it’s your one stop resource for everything digital. Today, I’m touching an important topic: What is an impression? It will help you in different aspects of your marketing.

Get ready to learn and dive in!

What Is An Impression?

Whether you call it an impression or a view-through, it’s when a user sees an advertisement. Don’t confuse it with engagement. That’s a different thing. An impression happens when a user opens an app or website and an advertisement is visible.

Impressions vs Clicks

The difference between these two metrics is kind of obvious — it’s in the name. The impression is just related to viewing the ad. On the other hand, an engagement, or a click, happens when the user actually follows through and clicks on the ad.

I know, you might be thinking, “Engagement seems like the real deal here. Why is he talking about impressions?” I agree but impressions have their own importance. Let’s talk about that.

Why Are Impressions Important?

There are many reasons why impressions are important in social media marketing. The first reasons is that it will help you understand the results of many ads. Mostly, you are charged for an ad on a Cost per Mille (CPM) basis for every thousand impressions.

Given that a popular method of purchasing advertising is by the number of impressions an advertisement generates, advertisers should know how many impressions a CPM advert generates to understand campaign cost.

Apart from understanding costs, it simply helps you with understanding the outreach of your ad. It provide a simple representation of how many people are seeing ads within a particular channel. It’s a simple number that tells a lot about how far an ad channel really reaches.

Not only that, but it also helps with other marketing metrics too, such as Click-Through Rates (known as CTR). Together, these metrics will let you know how your campaign is performing.

Reach, Impressions, And Your Marketing Strategy

We put great emphasis at impressions, including other metrics. Working with us, you’ll get results both in the form of impressions and clicks. That’s why we would like you to go beyond definitions and see what they mean for your marketing strategy.

Know Your Product

Know your product first. It’s obvious. No business owner, marketer, or writer should proceed with any form of marketing without knowing their subject. That’s a surefire way to get in trouble. It’s a great way to be an unreliable brand.

Being an expert is probably the best way to create trust. And if you come across as someone who doesn’t know what he/she is talking about, you’re headed for trouble.

Know Your Audience

Next up, we have another important part that marketers forget. It’s not as lethal as the above one, but it still has its cons.

To have a chance at great success, know your reader. Place yourself in their shoes. Ask yourself, “Would my content help me sell the stuff if I met the buyer in person?” “Or more importantly, would I buy it if someone sold it to me?”

So the more you know about your audience, the more it will increase your reach. And a greater reach means increased awareness. What business would not want to extend its reach to as many customers as possible?

But again, targeting your specific audience is the key here. For example, 20,000 people see your ad. But if only 1,000 are your ideal customers, the resources spent on others are kind of wasted.

So don’t be a brand whose messages get ignored. Your message should get to your target audience with full force.

In addition to that, see what part of your content people share, retweet, or reply to. This, again, will you extend your reach.

Monitor And Analyze Engagement Metrics Regularly

Like I said above, monitor your analytics. These things help you out immensely. They will help you understand different things, including the fact that how well are you getting in front off your intended audience.

See a spike in your impressions? That may be an indication that your content is getting into people’s feeds. Whatever social media you’re on, the content is more likely to be working for it. Learn from these efforts.

If not, optimize it for the platform you’re using. Check how you share your content.

Also, work on increasing the number of actively engaged fans in your community for that platform. You’ll see an increase in the impressions as soon as people start sharing your posts within their network.

Metrics And Blue Waves Digital

At Blue Waves Digital, we put metrics like impressions back into digital marketing.

In a world full of noise, people forget that the real results are shown in the form of these simple metrics, not some crazy numbers even a mathematician would have a hard time understanding.

So we make things simple. We work on numbers that matter to you and your audience!

Let’s discuss your next success story!