Home » SEM » But, what is the importance of ‘impressions’?

You might have heard people talk about the number of ‘impressions’ they are getting for their website and how they plan to further bolster that number in order to earn more money from their website.

Yes, ‘impressions’ is indeed one of the most important terms in the Internet marketing arena. In one of my other articles, I have explained the term ‘impressions’ in great detail but here I will just stop with saying that ‘impressions’ is the number of times a page or an ad is loaded (known as page and ad impressions respectively). Also, since most web masters use on-line advertising programs like ‘AdSense’ on their website, we will orient our discussion more towards importance of impressions in such programs.

So, what importance do impressions hold?

A lot of people think that impressions (rather ‘ad impressions’) are used to compute the revenue that one has earned from placing the ads on one’s website. However, this is not always the case (and it should not be the case if you really want to enhance the revenue from your website). Such contracts, which pay the website owners just for the number of impressions (i.e. the number of times an ad is shown on the website), are few in number and low paying too. Let me introduce another term that is relevant in this context – ‘CPM’. CPM means, “Cost per thousand impressions”. CPM is used to calculate the payout (which is generally very low) to the website owner in such cases.

But if you are really looking at earning some good amount of money through advertising on your website, you should not focus too much on increasing the ad impressions; instead you should look at increasing the clicks that you receive on the ads. The clicks are higher paying than the impressions as such (this is generally referred to as ‘Pay Per Click’ advertising or PPC). So, rather than increasing the number of ads on your web page, you should instead try to place them strategically in order to generate more clicks. This has also been proven by various case studies in on line advertising programs like AdSense.

Various techniques are used in order to get better results (clicks). In this context, the importance of impressions is limited to using this number to determine the performance of your web page. Hence, you should split the job in two parts – the first is to increase the probability of receiving clicks on your ads (i.e. increasing the CTR or ‘Click through rate’) and the second is to increase the possibility of such a probability by making your web page more attractive to the search engines and to the people in general.

So, you now know the amount of importance that you should attach to impressions vis-à-vis the attention you must pay to increasing clicks.

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