SEO Glossary: Impressions

 

What are impressions?

Impressions are an important metric. It is indispensable for statistics on the Internet and the associated success control. If a visitor is on a website and has visual contact with an element, this is referred to as an impression.

 

Impressions also refer exclusively to the visual contact as soon as an element is visually displayed. They have nothing to do with when a user clicks on an element (e.g. on an advertising banner).

 

Example: An advertiser installs a banner on their website. 1,000 visitors scroll over the page on which the banner is located. In this case, the ad receives 1,000 impressions.

 

Impressions are also used in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is the case, for example, when a search engine user scrolls through a list of results without opening a website. This also results in an impression.

 

 

How are impressions counted?

When an element such as an ad, banner or website appears on a user's screen, an impression is triggered. An appropriate tracking tool is required to record and count them.

 

It is important to note here that it does not matter if a user scrolls past an element without clicking on it. Because even then we are talking about an impression.

Where are impressions displayed?

To find out how many impressions an element has, you need to log in to the corresponding dashboard or control panel. There are various options for this.

 

Here are a few examples:

 

• Impressions in SERPs: If a website is displayed in the search engine results, impressions are counted. For example, in the Google Search Console. Here you can see how many impressions a website has achieved in a certain period of time.
• Advertisements: Advertisers book an ad, for example, with GOOGLE ADS or an ad network provider. A glance at the statistics in the dashboard reveals how many impressions an ad has achieved.
• Social media ads: Impressions are also displayed in the statistics for social media ads from Facebook, Instagram and the like. This also shows the relationship between impressions and clicks.
  As with the examples mentioned above, the situation is similar on other platforms. Here, the number of impressions is listed in the respective statistics.