November 29, 2008
What is an ad impression
I’ve blogged previously about various Web analytics terms. Almost all of those would be described as audience terms — they describe how people are viewing your site.
Let’s take a stab at some revenue terms, starting with:
What’s an ad impression?
It’s a measure of the number of times an ad is seen by a user. In that sense it’s almost like a page view, except it only refers to a portion of the page — where the ad is.
The number of impressions is important to several different sets of folks.
The advertising sales folks need to know how many impressions are generally available on the site, so that they don’t over or under sell.
The marketers buying ads on your site want to know how many impressions their particular ad, or set of ads, received. They’re likely paying for a set number of impressions and they want to make sure they weren’t undersold.
The marketers also care about the impressions of a campaign of ads across a variety of sites because that’s a measure of, roughly, how much effect the ads should have on the marketplace. Just as page views are impression of a piece of content’s influence on the marketplace.
An page can contain multiple ads and thus serve multiple impressions per page view. Why would a site put multiple ad units on a page? It’s all about CPM, but we’ll tackle that one another time.
Filed under: Business, Journalism, Technology
Next: What does CPM stand for?
Previous: Yesterday’s turkey
Comments
heisel.org > What does CPM stand for? – November 30, 2008 #
[...] It stands for Cost per thousand (the M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). What it’s measuring is the cost per thousand ad impressions. [...]