Riche Zamor's Blog

I have had a lot of conversations lately about the value of an impression. A lot of people wonder what the value of an impression is, especially as it relates to digital and social media. Brands want to know what the return on their investment is for each impression they buy or earn. 

Let’s first demystify impressions, because we often talk about them out of context. Impressions are just a unit of measurement for the display of a piece of content - whether it be on TV, online, OOH display, etc. Often times we talk about impressions as though they are tangible things, but an impression is a metric, just like a click through or a conversion. They are not digital assets. 

I explain this to give some context to my POV on the value of impressions. Because impressions are just a unit of measurement, we should evaluate it in the same way we look at other metrics available to us as marketers. I will focus on digital, because…well…where I usually measure them. 

My general opinion is that impressions are not a valuable metric to measure in digital and don’t tell us much outside how of how many times content, in whatever form it may be, is displayed to some target audience. The metric in and of itself doesn’t give brands any valuable information they can use to optimize marketing efforts because it has no valuable result. Knowing a piece of your content displayed 100,000 times to people visiting your site doesn’t actually tell you what the impact that impression has on your bottom line. 

There are a few other reasons that I think impressions lack much value when measuring the effectiveness of marketing efforts:

1. The number of impressions can be deceptive. Although your page content may display X number of times, that doesn’t tell you how many unique people saw your content. There are also a lot of things in digital that can throw off the accuracy of the total number of impressions a piece of content was displayed.
2. Impressions need context to be meaningful. Without another metric to add depth to the total number of impressions, it is a meaningless number. Now when you combine it with the unique number of viewers, you get a sense of how many times a given person may have seen your content. Or, when you pair impressions up with the number of conversions, you get a sense of how many times someone needed to see a piece of content before they completed your desired action.
3. Not all impressions are created equal. The impact of an impression of a search ad versus a Facebook ad that shows you which of your friends liked that ad unit have different effects on people. Same thing when looking at the effect a TV commercial has on someone versus a them tweet. Comparing the impact of impressions in different channels, on different platforms, and in different formats is an apples to oranges comparison. 

Given that, I would argue that impressions shouldn’t be measured. Focus on measuring the outcome you want to happen once someone is displayed that piece of content. Whether you want them to click through to your site, comment on a post, or make a purchase, focus on measuring those things that impact the actual goals of your marketing efforts.