Digital

Evaluating Impressions vs. Page Views

by Jessica Smith Posted On May 22nd, 2017 | 4:27pm EST

Wondering why your impressions are so high and your page views so meh? Before you start strategizing your current campaigns, maybe take a moment to revisit what makes these two similar-yet-different metrics so important for your content strategy.

Page views and impressions are calculations that help track visitor behavior on your website. Both are measuring the number of people who view each page and the number who see specific elements. When a user visits a page on your website, it counts as one page view. The number of times a visitor sees a specific element of a page (usually an advertisement) is referred to as an impression. Let’s break this down further.

Page Views

Every visitor to your site generates one page view. The first page view is typically to your site’s homepage, but it could be any page clicked from a search engine result or social media post. Page views are counted for each page on your site. When analytics determines the average number of page views, it divides the total number of views by the number of unique visitors to your site in order to determine how many pages visitors are engaging with. This is where page views differ from impressions.

Impressions

Each time a person loads a page and an element is visible – an image, text or video – it counts as an impression. An impression doesn’t necessarily mean a user is coming to a page with a purpose to read into your content. But these numbers do mean that users are coming to your site and allowing advertisements and elements to load. This is why impressions are often the metric used to calculate how much an advertiser pays to display a message on a site. Think of impressions like billboards on the highway—millions of people may view them, but only hundreds will answer a call to action. One of the biggest issues facing this model is adblocker. Your site may have thousands of impressions, but a large portion of them could be viewing with adblocker. This renders pop-ups, banners and in-text ads almost obsolete.

Both page views and impressions are important in measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. These metrics reveal how your messaging is coming across to users. Are you blending into their daily content in a relevant way that they organically engage with? Or are you coming off a little too strong and causing them to click away? These metrics can be telling of your promotion on a certain site or social media. Your ability to be a chameleon is key for a successful push on third party sites.

Lastly, these metrics are great for helping publishers and advertisers work together for building a quality site with good user experience and visible ad placement. It’s thanks to these metrics (and our slight obsession with them) that native advertising has become so popular.

If these metric terms seem complex, it’s because they are. Let City/Studio cut through the confusion and help you establish your site and brand. To see how we operate, click here.