Back to Glossary

Impression Defined

In digital marketing and advertising, "impression" refers to the opportunity for a campaign or ad to be seen and to influence its audience into becoming a user or customer. Impressions are sometimes called "view-throughs."

Impressions are one key performance metric that companies will track in order to gauge the success of their marketing and advertising efforts. Oftentimes, impressions are used to represent the reach of a particular advertisement or campaign. Although the number of impressions that a campaign receives can tell you about the size of the audience and potential for engagement, it does not represent the actual engagement.

How to Use it in a Sentence

Impressions are an important metric for advertisers and marketers alike.

Common FAQs

Whereas an impression represents the opportunity for engagement, a click represents the actual audience engagement. Looking at clicks in relation to impressions can give you a more accurate click-through rate (CTR) and help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing or advertising strategy.

In advertising, impressions are important because they represent the size of the audience an advertiser is paying to show an ad to in a particular channel. By calculating the number of impressions an ad receives, advertisers can interpret the "reach" of that campaign.

For marketers, impressions can be used to calculate a more accurate message click-through rate. This is done by taking the total number of clicks divided by the total impressions multiplied by one hundred.