Among other key indicators, impressions allow you to evaluate the performance of your digital content: here's what they are and why they are important.
Whether you want to start your own online business or are looking to consolidate your digital business, you've probably already heard about the impressions.
Isn't that right? Well, it's time you knew something about it.
Yeah, because among the various metrics of Data Analysis, impressions allow you to monitor and quantify your efforts to web marketing. In fact, in order to implement a proper strategy and achieve your goals, it is important to rely on accurate reports that give you information about users and their behaviors.
As I said. in this article on the KPI, i.e., key performance indicators, are essential to understand how good your actions are: knowing and using them serves you to make better decisions. And impressions are just one of them.
It is a concept that comes from advertising and is now used in various contexts; it is known to most people mainly because of Instagram and to the functionality of the stories. In fact, they have always existed and are useful for monitoring various digital content.
So how about going a little deeper into this topic?
Continue reading: you will understand what impressions are and why they are important to the success of your business.
What are impressions?
Impressions are a metric commonly used in online marketing to measure how often ads are viewed.
In simpler words, the term impressions refers to the number of times that your digital content is viewed on the screen by someone, whether or not it is clicked on.
They are often associated with online ads or Instagram stories, but can refer to any digital content (e.g., e-mails or articles from the blog). Basically, every time a user views a specific piece of content, whether it is a post, video, banner, web page, or advertisement, the impression counter increases by one.
Impression counting is essential for estimating Web advertising costs (in fact, ads are often paid based on this metric), as well as to measure the performance of social media campaigns.
As I mentioned earlier, however, these indicators do not take into account how many people clicked on an ad or then actually took the action described in the call-to-action.
Why impressions are important
Why then is it a parameter that you should take into consideration?
In general, we can say that they help you better understand your digital marketing actions: knowing whether or not what you have done is working is necessary to plan future strategies as well-and, most importantly, to bring home results.
On the various social networks, you can advertise to attract new visitors, generate traffic and engage potential customers through specific call-to-actions. One of the most important indicators is precisely the number of views that a piece of content manages to generate: it is therefore worth taking this metric into account if you use the various platforms to promote your products and services through social advertising.
They are also useful if we think about e-mail: for example, if the impressions of your newsletter are good, but people are not responding to the call-to-actions embedded in them, perhaps you need to review the content and ask yourself if there is something that does not resonate properly with your audience.
This can help you reevaluate your strategic plan in the way you structure your messages or calls to action.
Or again, impressions can give you insight into your audience's perception and awareness of your brand - something that plays a huge role in marketing and business in general to build and expand your customer base (in this article I'm really talking to you about the importance of the brand positioning).
This, combined with other data metrics, can help you measure and evaluate your social outreach to act accordingly.
So basically, here are the benefits that impressions bring to your marketing strategies:
- You can get to know your target audience better: greater reach leads to greater awareness; your messages need to be at least viewed for them to have an effect. Knowing the behavior of your current and potential customers allows you to design content tailored to them.
- You can monitor involvement: impressions measure your ability to present your content to your intended audience; when they increase, your content is likely to surface more frequently in users' feeds, and this usually means that your posts are optimized for the social network you are using.
- You can understand the level of awareness of your brand: Much research suggests that users must have seen an ad at least several times before they begin to learn about the brand.
Whether it is a piece of web content or an advertisement, impressions provide an idea of how far they are potentially spread online.
Combining this metric with other metrics can answer an even more interesting question: how much did users interact with what you offered them?
Knowing this data, you can in fact increase the optimization of your conversion rate, or evaluate the performance of text, images and video in a given ad.
Difference between impression and reach
Let's say you've just launched an ad campaign or spread a piece of content online and you want to see how it's doing. You open your analytics dashboard and see two words appear: "impression" and "reach."
You are sure they are two separate things, but you have never fully understood the difference.
I'll explain it to you right now!
First of all, let us reiterate one important thing: the impressions are not measured by clicks or user interactions with your content, but are solely about the overall number of views. This is regardless of whether they are the same people or different people and whether they are clicked by the same people or not.
Le reach, often translated as "cover," instead indicates the number of users Who view your digital content.
Simply put: if your content is viewed by 1000 people, 1000 will be the reach; but if each of those 1000 people views your content twice, then the total impressions will be 2000.
Or again: if 1000 people look at your ad 3 times, we will have 1000 reach and 3000 impressions.
A little clearer?
Coverage and impressions refer to two separate activities, so which metric you choose to pay more attention to will depend on your goals. Both actually allow you to evaluate the performance of your digital content: most of the time, you will need to use them together to understand their overall effectiveness.
Conclusion
Now that you know what the impressions and how important they are in digital marketing, you just have to use them in your campaign evaluations.
It's good for you to keep in mind that the only way to know if your efforts are working is to monitor and analyze metrics like these: tracking data across the Web is critical to understanding what works and what doesn't-and, more importantly, to avoid wasting time and money on what isn't worth it.
Actually, there are many other KPIs that help you do this-don't worry, I will tell you about them very soon 😉
Photo by Callum Parker on Unsplash