What Is an Ad Impression and Why Are They Important to Track?

What Are Ad Impressions?

Ad impressions are counted each time your ad is shown on a search results page, social media feed, or elsewhere online.

This metric doesn’t measure engagement or clicks. It measures the potential for exposure. It tells you the number of users that could have seen your ad. Whether they noticed it or not.

Many digital advertising platforms let you track your ad impressions. Here’s an example of what impressions data looks like in TikTok Ads Manager:

Ad Impressions vs. Reach vs. Clicks

Ad impressions reflect the total number of times your ads could have been seen by users. Depending on the specific type of ad impression (more on that below), it could mean the number of times an ad appeared on a user’s screen. 

Again, importantly, it doesn’t necessarily mean the user saw or noticed the ad.

Ad reach, on the other hand, measures the number of unique individuals who may have seen your ad. For example, if one user sees your ad five times, that counts as five impressions. But you only reached one unique user.

As with impressions, it doesn’t mean each unique user noticed your ad. 

Ad clicks measure the number of clicks your ad receives. These can tell you a lot about how effective your ads are at driving traffic to your landing pages.

Your ad impressions will typically be higher than the number of unique users you reach. Which in turn will usually be greater than the number of clicks.

Why Are Ad Impressions Important?

Tracking ad impressions is important because it can help you:

Understand Your Campaign’s Reach

Analyzing impression data alongside engagement metrics like clicks and conversion rates helps you assess how effectively your ads are reaching the right audience.

But if you’re running a brand awareness campaign, metrics like clicks may not be the most useful to track. Instead, you may just want to track how many people could have seen your ads.

Ad impressions are an ideal metric for doing just that. The more impressions your ad receives, the greater its potential reach. And the greater your chances of boosting your brand awareness.

So, monitoring your impressions can help you understand when your ads are underperforming. And not reaching a wide enough audience.

Track Your Ad’s Click-Through Rate

Tracking impressions or clicks alone isn’t always the best way to monitor ad performance. 

For example, imagine your ad is receiving 50 clicks per day. You might think that’s great. And perhaps it’s in line with your campaign’s goals.

But if it took 10K impressions to get those 50 clicks, you may not be targeting the right audience with your ads. Or your ads might not be convincing enough to generate enough clicks.

This relationship between impressions and clicks is measured through another metric—click-through rate (CTR). You can determine your CTR by dividing the number of clicks your ad receives by the number of impressions.

Your click-through rate is often a more valuable metric to track in terms of ad performance compared to impressions or clicks alone. As it can provide insights into how engaging your ads are.

But you wouldn’t be able to track your CTR without impressions in the first place.

Gain Optimization Insights

Your ad impression data can also provide insights you can use to improve your ad performance. 

For example, low impressions overall can indicate many issues, including:

• Incorrect targeting 
• Poor ad quality
• Suboptimal placements 

Each of these issues could lead to wasted ad budget.

Types of Ad Impressions

Ad impressions can fall into several categories based on how they are counted and displayed:

Served Impressions

Served impressions are recorded whenever an ad server successfully loads an ad onto a webpage, regardless of whether the user has seen it. If an ad appears on a part of the page that’s not visible to the user (like below the fold), it is still counted.

You can use served impressions to assess how effectively your campaigns reach different channels and websites. However, your data may not provide an accurate representation of how many users actually saw your ad.

Viewable Impressions

Viewable impressions measure how often an ad is visible on a user’s screen. This provides a more accurate assessment of how many prospects may see your ads.

While this still doesn’t necessarily mean the user saw or noticed your ad, it does mean they could have seen it. Unlike with served impressions, where the ad may have loaded in somewhere the user couldn’t actually see it.

For an ad impression to be viewable, it has to fit specific criteria:

• According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Media Rating Council (MRC) industry standards, at least 50% of a display ad’s pixels must be visible on the screen for at least one continuous second to be considered a viewable impression 
• For video ads, at least 50% of the ad’s pixels must be visible for two continuous seconds

How Many Impressions Is Good for an Ad?

The ideal number of ad impressions can vary significantly, depending on crucial factors like industry, audience targeting, ad type, and campaign goals.

Ultimately, there’s no single benchmark that’s considered “good.”

Avoid trying to identify the “right” numbers for your industry, audience, or format. Instead, focus on maximizing your ad impressions and campaign performance by delivering the right ads to the right audience.

Some factors that affect impressions include:

• Budget: Are you spending enough to bid and win in the ad auction? Consider increasing your budget to drive more impressions.
• Ad quality: Check your ad’s quality and increase it by improving or adding more headlines, descriptions, or creatives.
• Keyword search volume: If few people are searching for your target keywords, you’re unlikely to get many impressions from search ads. Research related keywords that could create more impression opportunities (see below).

Best Practices to Maximize Ad Impressions

Here are three tips that can help you improve your ad visibility and boost overall campaign performance:

Target the Right Keywords with Your Ads

Targeting specific keywords that align with your business objectives and audience interests can significantly improve the quality and impact of your search ad impressions. Leading to higher engagement rates. And potentially more conversions.

But how can you find these relevant keywords that are likely to yield high-quality impressions from the right audience?

By using Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool.

Just type a broad search term related to your products or services into the search box. Then, select your target location. And click the “Search” button.

You’ll see a keyword research report like this:

Filter the keywords according to the search intent (why a user searches for a term) to ensure that you’re meeting the right intent.

The four main types of intent are:

• Navigational: The user is looking for a specific website or page (e.g., “t shirt organizer [brand name] website”)
• Informational: The user is looking for more information or the answer to a question (e.g., “best way to organize t shirts”)
• Commercial: The user is researching brands or products/services (e.g., “organic cotton t shirts”)
• Transactional: The user is ready to take action, like making a purchase (e.g., “buy organic cotton t shirt”)

You likely want to target some keywords with commercial and transactional intent. As these are typically searched by those close to or ready to make a purchase. 

To filter by search intent, click the “Intent” drop-down menu. Then, select “Commercial” and “Transactional” and click the “Apply” button.

You can also use other factors like:

• Keyword search volume: An estimate of how many monthly searches that keyword gets. A higher search volume can mean more potential for impressions if your ad ranks well for that keyword in search results.
• Cost per click (CPC): How much you’ll likely need to spend to have your ad appear for that keyword. It reflects the competitiveness and value of a keyword in paid advertising. 

You ideally want to target keywords with high search volume and low CPC. But sometimes keywords with high costs per click can be worth targeting if they have a high conversion rate. The same applies to keywords with low volume but high transactional intent.

Craft Compelling Banner Ads

If you’re running display ads, visually appealing and relevant banners help capture your target audience’s attention. Making it more likely that they’ll notice and engage with your ad. Rather than just scroll past (which still counts as an impression).

Use banner designs and messages that resonate with the specific demographics, interests, and behaviors of your target audience. To increase the chances that users who see your ads click them.

Use the Instant Banner Generator to create custom, visually compelling banners for your ad campaigns.

Click the “IAB display formats” tab. Select your preferred banner ad size. You can select one or all of the sizes.

Scroll down to add your brand guidelines. This is where you can import your logo. 

Drag it to the box or import it by clicking the “Browse your computer” button. Tick the checkbox next to “Click to define a color” to set your brand color.

Then, scroll down to import a picture for your ad. You can import images from your device or get free stock photos from Unsplash.

Scroll down to enter your ad copy. Then click the “Save settings & generate banners” button.

You’ll see a variety of ad banner designs. Save the ones you like and access them in the “Favorites” tab.

Select a banner you want to use and click “Download.”

Test different versions of the banner with different headlines to find out which ones perform best. This lets you understand which banner designs get the most impressions that lead to conversions. 

Optimize Bidding and Placement

Optimizing bidding strategies and ad placements can help you use your marketing budget efficiently.

Bidding optimization involves fine-tuning your approach to win ad placements at competitive rates. To optimize this element, choose the right bidding model and performance goal.

For example, with Meta ads, you can choose a performance goal like “Maximize reach of ads” or “Maximize number of impressions.” To show your ads to the maximum number of people or the maximum number of times, respectively.

Placement optimization ensures your ads appear in contexts and locations that resonate best with your target audience. To optimize this element, identify your top-performing ad placements.

This could be keyword-related (for search ads). Or specific websites your display ads are appearing on.

Monitor Your Efforts to Optimize Your Ad Impressions

To maximize your ad impressions and ultimately see success with your campaigns, you need to continuously monitor, analyze, and refine your strategies.

Staying on top of key metrics like impressions, reach, clicks, and CTR helps you understand where your ads are performing well. And where you need to make changes.

Whether that’s in the keywords you target. Or the banners you use for your display ads.

Semrush offers various tools and apps to help you optimize your ad campaigns. Like the Keyword Magic Tool and the Instant Banner Generator app.

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