Ad Impressions

An ad's loaded and viewed count is what it is, very simply, a count of how many times the ad has been loaded and viewed in a user's feed, timeline, story, or other display locations on a social media platform. This is the impression metric, and it's the main one we use for measuring not just the ad's visibility but reaching power, too. Every time the ad loads anywhere, it counts as one new impression. But that will happen a lot. If the ad is in the same user's association space three times at once, that's three impressions. No confusion with Engagements in this basic accounting; the Engagements are what come after the impressions in this sequence of advertisement events. Once you've been exposed to an ad (the impression), what you do next (or don't do next) tells us something more about not just the ad's reach but also its resonance. As exposure measures go, impressions gauge the ad's potential social media reach pretty well. Still, we know that more exposure doesn't equal more ad effectiveness (in part, we know this because ads can be 'seen' pretty frequently). To round this simple discussion numbers-wise, a Cost Per Impression stat (CPI) allows marketers to see how much they're paying, on average, for every single 1,000 times the ads load and get viewed somewhere.