Every marketer wants to know the impact of their campaigns, and impressions are a calculation of just that.
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What are impressions?
Impressions are the total number of exposures to your content. This can include the same person seeing your content multiple times.
Impressions are tracked on many different platforms. For example, how many times people see your Instagram posts, or how many times your ad is displayed with Google Ads.
Impressions are often confused with reach. While reach counts the number of people who saw your content, impressions count the total number of views.
Why should you track impressions?
Impressions tell you how many times your content has been viewed, so that’s interesting on its own. But your impressions give you more information when you compare them against other metrics.
For example, content with a high impression to reach ratio mean that people are re-viewing your content many times—which probably means they like it!
Or, if you have lots of Instagram followers but relatively few impressions, it could mean that you may have followers that don’t spend very much time on Instagram, and you may want to target a different demographic.
How are impressions calculated
On most platforms, an impression is tracked every time your content visibly appears in someone’s feed.
On a platform without a feed, like Snapchat for example, a “Story View” would be considered the same as an impression.
How to measure impressions
Most platforms give you impression data directly on a post’s analytics. On Instagram, for example, you can go to your profile and tap “Insights” to see your posts’ impression data.
To track all your impressions in one place, you can use a social media analytics tool like Keyhole.
Keyhole will not only show you the total impressions you achieve on your posts, but it will also help you identify content that is likely to get the most impressions before you even post!
This can help you pick strategies that are more likely to result in increased viewership.
Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword + hashtag analytics and social media analytics across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free here.
Related Articles:
What Is Social Media Reach?
Reach vs Impressions
Frequently Asked Questions
Impressions are the total number of exposures to your content. This can include the same person seeing your content multiple times. Impressions are tracked on many different platforms. For example, how many times people see your Instagram posts, or how many times your ad is displayed with Google Ads.
Impressions tell you how many times your content has been viewed, so that’s interesting on its own. But your impressions give you more information when you compare them against other metrics.
Is reach better than impressions?
Impressions are often confused with reach. While reach counts the number of people who saw your content, impressions count the total number of views.