What Does Impression Mean?

When it comes to SEO and marketing, there are so many different terms used to describe so many different things.

If you know anything about marketing and selling your products or services online, then you are likely familiar with the concept of a sales funnel.

What Does Impression Mean

Each and every part of this funnel is important for hooking in potential customers and then converting this into sales. So some of the terms you’ve likely heard are impressions, click through rates, and pay per click.

But what does impression mean? How is this relevant to the whole SEO thing and converting impressions into sales? Is it important to the overall sales process?

Today, we’re going to cover everything that you need to know about impressions and how this is relevant to your business! Impressions are a key part of the marketing process, so they’re not to be sniffed at.

The more impressions your website has, the more likely you are to have people clicking through to your website, and the more likely you are to have people converting into customers.

So let’s take a look at everything you need to know about impressions!

What Is Impression In Search?

In terms of SEO and search engines, impression is the term that is given to the amount of times that your website appears in search results.

So if you have a website on dogs for example, and someone searches for something like “How often should you walk your dog,” and your article featuring the exact same keywords appears in the search results, this counts as an impression.

The same thing counts if you have a certain product or service on your website that someone searches for.

It’s important to note that an impression doesn’t mean the same thing as someone clicking through to your website to read this article or buy this product. An impression is the very start of the process.

Most of the time impressions don’t result in conversions – it just shows you the number of times that your item or article has appeared within search results.

However, the more impressions that your website has, the more likely someone is to click through onto this website.

This is why SEO is important, too. Without that optimization for search engines, your website isn’t likely to appear in the first page of search results.

Which means less impressions, and it will be less likely to have people clicking through to your website.

The better your SEO, the more impressions you will have. The more impressions you have, the more likely people will click through to your website, and the more likely they will be to see what products or services you have to offer.

This will then make them more likely to convert to customers!

This same concept applies to advertising. If you have paid to advertise your website or product online, an impression will refer to the amount of times that someone has seen your advert.

Why Are Impressions Important For SEO?

So we’ve covered this already a little up above, but impressions are very important when it comes to SEO.

They might not mean someone has clicked through your advert to see what it is you’re advertising in more detail, or even converted into a sale.

However, impressions can be used to see how successful your adverts are doing online.

What Does Impression Mean (1)

When using the impression metric correctly, you can see how well or how poorly an ad is doing, and think about how you can improve this.

If the ad is doing well, you know that the certain parameters that you have set it to are successful for your business or the product that you are trying to sell.

You can then replicate this with your other ads, finding the right market to show them to.

If the impressions metric shows as really low, then chances are something isn’t quite right with the parameters you have set. You will need to think about your audience and who you are marketing this to.

What Is Better: Pay Per Click Or Impression?

It can be tricky choosing between pay per click (PPC) and pay per impression (PPI) ads.

The price of the ads can differ between the two, but there’s no guarantee that either will result in an immediate return on your investment.

PPC ads are one of the more popular options, because you can guarantee that people will have clicked through onto your website before you get charged for the ad.

PPI ads are much cheaper than PPC ads.

However, as we have briefly mentioned above, there is no guarantee that the people who are seeing your ad will actually click through onto the site to learn more about the product or service that you are trying to sell.

This will of course mean you could end up spending more money, and not see as much revenue in return.

It will all come down to how much money you are willing to spend, and how quickly you would like to see a return on your investment.

In Summary

And there you have it! You now know that the term impression is used to describe how many times your website has appeared in a search engine such as Google each time a certain term is searched for.

Impressions don’t necessarily relate to clicks or interactions with your website. This just means that your website has appeared on the search results for a certain amount of times. 

So the higher the impressions, the more likely you are to have people clicking through onto your website to purchase items.

This makes impressions very important for your business, even if it means you’re not guaranteed to convert every one of them to sales.

This is the very start of the sales funnel to hopefully getting you more of a return on your investment.

It will be important to take your impressions seriously, as they can be a very useful metric for helping you to finesse your marketing strategy. 

Justin Shaw