Ad Impressions: Now You See Them, Now You Don’t

You all know what ads are. You see them all over the place in tons of different formats. You use them to advertise for your products and services. But what’s an ad impression?

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) says it’s “a measurement of responses from an ad delivery system to an ad request from the user’s browser, which is filtered from robotic activity and is recorded at a point as late as possible in the process of delivery of the creative material to the user’s browser — therefore closest to actual opportunity to see by the user.”

Whoa. Let’s break that down:

So For Real, What Is It?

Let’s make this a little clearer. An ad impression is how many people see your ad, how many views your ad gets. But impressions don’t require any clicks or conversions.

An ad appearing on a webpage = an impression.

Some advertisers run on a PPI, or pay per impression, basis. So, when anyone sees the ad, the advertiser pays the publisher.

Ad Impressions as a KPI

Impressions can be used as a key performance indicator to see how your campaign is doing.

Ad impressions specifically show you if your campaign is reaching as large an audience as you’d like it to. It’s great to measure if one of your main focuses is brand awareness, rather than making immediate conversions.

And even if awareness isn’t the dominant purpose of your campaign, pairing impressions with other KPIs can help measure how your campaign is going. Ideally, you want a good balance of impressions to high conversion rate. If this isn’t the case, you may want to consider optimizing your campaign.

Most advertisers don’t solely rely on ad impressions (or any one KPI) to decide if their campaign is working for them. You need to use a combo to truly tell.

Measuring Impressions

So all of this is awesome, but it still leaves the very tricky and sticky question of how ad impressions are measured. When is an ad counted as seen?

First of all, who counts ad impressions?

Without getting too technical, robotic activity processes ad requests and deliveries on the user’s browser. What’s really important is the standard the measurement is based on.

The current standard of measuring ad impressions is by served impressions. Served impressions are counted regardless of whether or not the ad was fully loaded or in viewable browser space. In other words, when a webpage loads and has your ad somewhere on it, that counts as someone viewing it, whether or not they actually did.

The problem with served impressions is that an impression can sometimes be counted before anyone sees it. The user could have switched tabs, x’d out of the browser, or not scrolled down far enough to see it. There are tons of variables that could lead to a user not actually seeing an ad.

However, the IAB is in the process of switching the standard of measuring ad impressions to viewable impressions. Viewable impressions are counted only if at least 50% of the ad is viewable on an in-focus browser tab for at least 1 second. This way you’re not paying for unseen ads. (You can check out specifics of this new standard here.)

Let’s put this in different terms. I feel a metaphor coming on!

Measurement Metaphor

Imagine you’re going to the movies, but you’re running late. You slip in just as the opening credits are coming to a close and Ryan Gosling is strolling onto the screen. But here’s the thing: regardless of the fact that you were late and didn’t see them, the trailers before the movie still played and someone had to pay for them.

This scenario is just like served impressions. Even though you may not see the trailer, they’re still counted because you had the opportunity to see them.

But if you’re sprinting into the theater and catch the second half of a trailer, that counts as a viewable impression. You saw it, even if it was just a smidge of the Avengers flying into the sky. That counts just as much as if you had seen the entire thing.

Now What?

In this murky middle-ground of switching between standards, measuring ad impressions is usually handled differently depending on the company. It’s an agreement settled between the publishers and the advertisers.

To be careful, some advertisers will request ad placement that is specifically above the fold, or in the immediate view of the user when a web page is opened. That way, a user is more likely to actually see your ad.

Surely, there are goods and bads to both standards, but ad impressions often have a high likelihood of collecting skewed data, so its difficult to eliminate all cons.

On the other hand, measuring impressions is an important component in evaluating your campaign to see if it’s reaching a sufficiently sized audience.

Whichever standard you use, be sure to measure ad impressions to make sure that your ad is being thoroughly presented to users and that they’re seeing it too!

Ad Impressions: Now You See Them, Now You Don’t