how impressions work
broadly one impression is equal to each occurrence of a web page ad or piece of content being found and loaded because it is accessible to both measure and understand it has become the most convenient and economical way to determine whether an advertisement is being seen or not but exactly how that figure is interpreted is up for debate some online advertising experts believe that there is no exact way to count impressions since a count can be skewed by a single person registering the same ad in several page views for example there are several more ways for total impression numbers to be skewed which leads to advertisers to view any impression figure with a bit of skepticism in general most advertisers and publishers decide beforehand how impressions are counted and accounted for advertisers may decide on whether a campaign is successful or not based on another form of reporting such as engagement broadly how an ad viewer interacts with an ad impression accountingfrequently impressions are measured by cost per mille cpm where mille refers to 1 000 impressions or cost per thousand a banner ad might have a cpm of 5 meaning that the website owner receives 5 every time an ad on his website is displayed 1 000 times the owner of a website may be paid for each ad impression other advertising arrangements may only pay the website owner when a visitor clicks on the ad or clicks on the ad and makes a purchase typically advertisers pay less for an ad campaign based solely on impressions and more for campaigns based on click throughs and conversions the reason for this difference in pay rates is that an ad that causes its viewer to take action resulting in a sale is more valuable to the advertiser than one that does not still impressions are useful when running public relations campaigns that are designed to build an image or create awareness about a company or product the exact way impressions are counted is somewhat technical ad servers provide a barely visible image or pixel that can be found on each publisher page when a page with that pixel image loads an impression is made impression fraudseveral things can skew impression counts for one estimates have that around 60 of all web traffic is from bots impression counts make no distinction between a human ad viewer or a bot ads can also fail to load or the incorrect ad may load such errors may or may not be accounted for there is also outright fraud with unscrupulous website developers using several methods to game the system one estimate is that a quarter of the online advertising market is fraudulent nonetheless impressions remain a popular way to measure engagement whether in advertising social media or analyzing web traffic 