Home » SEM » Do you really understand the term ‘impressions’?

‘Impressions’ is a term that you would have quite commonly heard in the world of internet marketing. Let’s check what ‘impressions’ means and how people get confused with this term.

Impressions are classified as either page impressions or ad impressions. Here, by page impressions we imply web page impressions. A page impression is used to refer to the number of times a page is loaded in a user’s browser. Similarly, ad impressions are referred to the aggregate number of times ads are shown to a user.

In order to understand this better lets take an example. Consider a website that has 4 web pages. Whenever a particular web page is accessed (loaded) by a person who visits the website – 1 page impression is recorded. Since different webpages could have a different number of users visiting them, the page impressions for each of the webpages of the website could be different. Also, different webpages could be laid out differently and hence contain different numbers of ads.

So, if a particular webpage contains 9 ads – that page has the potential of recording 9 ad impressions per page impression. Note that here we have used the word ‘potential’ intentionally. A lot of people believe that the ad impressions for a particular page could be easily calculated by multiplying the page impressions number by the number of ads on the page. However, this is not always the case. Ad impressions are recorded only if the ads are actually loaded on the webpage. It is quite possible that a page loads on the user’s browser but ads on the page are not loaded (or only some of the ads are loaded). In such a case, 1 page impression is recorded, the aggregate ad impressions recorded is lesser than the full potential (which, in our example, is 9).

There could be several reasons why ads are not loaded on a page. There could be technical problems e.g. the ad-serving server might not be working or the piece of code that is responsible for showing-up the ads might be incorrect. Another important reason could be unavailability of sufficient ads (which can sometimes happen with the online advertising programs). Or the user does not meet the requirements that the advertiser has specified for their particular ad to be run.

So, that should clear up the difference between page impressions and ad impressions.

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