What is an Impression in Marketing?

Sometimes it’s easier to learn about boring marketing concepts through storytelling. So let’s take a mental stroll through a short story.

Imagine you walk up to a bartop in a gorgeous hotel restaurant. Your eye immediately finds the bartender who is shaking up a tasty, refreshing beverage. Then, your eye slowly falls to the back wall behind the bartender, the wall full of wine and liquor bottle labels. As your eye scans, you’re sort of taking the wall in as a “whole”. You haven’t stopped yet on any one specific bottle label to inquire about it any further.

That is an impression.

The digital sense of the above story is the same as scrolling your timeline, though never stopping really on any one video or post to engage with it in any meaningful way.

The same would be true of a Google Search Results page if all you did after the search results page loaded was scroll through the options. Yep, still an “impression”.

Every post on a social media platform, and every link on a google search results page is simply an impression at this point.

No real action has been taken, to speak of.

You might have seen, if you’ve snagged the Business Basics Course, that an “impression” is a type of KPI or, key performance indicator. While not all that exciting on its own, impressions can be a valuable metric or, KPI to follow as it relates to whatever would happen next. For example, if you were monitoring this KPI, along with the “Click-Through Rate” KPI for your social media marketing and discovered that, over the last week, every time your post hit 1,000 impressions, you were also getting on average 10 click-throughs to your link or website, then you could begin to predict that you need at least 1,000 impressions to effectively predict 10 click-throughs.