Impressions Count

What counts as an impression on social media? The total number of times a post, ad, story, or other piece of content is displayed on a user's screen. There is no requirement for a user to take any action for an impression to be counted, making it a simple—if not somewhat rudimentary—metric for gauging not just the how, but also the where and when of content in a user's path.

An impression happens every time a content unit is rendered in a user's feed or timeline, in any orientation or context. You can render the same unit of content at a different point in a user's path, and you could tag that rendering an impression even if it was never seen from an overview, nor touched, liked, shared, or saved. You could run the same content in a different format, at a different time, or for a different audience, and you'd count each of those occurrences as a fresh set of impressions.

You could also count, as they do in the ad industry, how many impressions your content served up in users' stories, guides, public profiles, or search results.