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Are impressions relevant to measure and track?

In order to answer this question, we first need to find out what is meant by an impression (directly translated into English as in impression) or more correctly translated into English as exposure.

What are impressions?

An impression as we will interpret it in this blog post is when a person is exposed to your message or brand. It can be an ad, a logo or just a mention in some context.Impressions are often measured in social media and in that context means that someone has seen your post or ad in that social media. The same goes for impressions in search engines such as Google (if you have set up Google Search Console) i.e. that someone has seen a result for your website in a search.

If you want to learn how to measure, download the Quick Google Guide below: DOWNLOAD THE QUICK GOOGLE GUIDE

Inboth these contexts, it is an accurate measure of how many impressions you have. For more traditional channels, you can also talk about impressions or reach for exposure when you buy an ad in e.g. a newspaper or advertise on TV. You can't get an exact measure of how many people have read or opened that particular page, but you get a rough idea.

Shift in focus from traditional to digital channels

Everyone who works in marketing is familiar with both traditional channels and ways of marketing something and the more modern digital channels.The traditional channels, such as advertising in newspapers, on buses, TV, etc. is about being visible with your brand and offer to as large a mass as possible at as low a cost as possible. In short, you paid for estimated exposure and nothing else when you created an ad for traditional channels, or organically got written about in a newspaper or talked about on TV.

Today, the focus is more on clicks or conversions. As digital channels allow you to measure precise customer flows and follow a customer from impression to click to conversion on your website, it is more natural to pay closer to a final purchase. In this case, it will then be clicks that lead to the website that you can pay for when you advertise via Google Ads or any social channel such as Facebook and LinkedIn, for example.

What does Times Square have to do with digital marketing?

Even if you haven't been to Times Square yourself, you've probably heard of the place in the middle of Manhattan filled with digital screens displaying advertisements for many of the most famous brands in the world. You can see HM, NIKE, Adidas, NASDAQ and all sorts of brands flitting by on the screens.

According to Investopedia.com, it costs between 10 and 40 million SEK per year to advertise in Times Square and for the largest display screens it costs almost 30 million SEK per month!

The companies that choose to advertise for these staggering sums have no way of tracking how many of these potential exposures lead to a purchase or where the customer goes into their stores or on their website. It does, however, build brand awareness.

If you've been to Times Square, you'll also know that it's hard to take in all these impressions and ads at once, and if you have to tell someone about the ads you've seen, you probably can't remember more than 10-20 of the several hundred companies that advertise there.

But the ads that you can't remember but you've been exposed to will remain in your subconscious and you will definitely react to the brand if you see it in a different context at a later time.

Similarly, you can think about impressions/exposures in your digital media.

Impressions builds your brand!

If you manage to increase your impressions on social media or in internet searches (e.g. Google or Bing), this can be seen as building your brand.It is said that you need at least seven interactions with a brand/company to result in a sale and one such interaction can definitely be being exposed in a Google search without anyone clicking on your link.

If you're looking for an answer to something on the Internet and the first result that comes up is from a website you don't know or have never heard of, chances are you'll scroll down and find another source. However, if the next day you are searching the Internet for an answer to something else on the same topic and the same website/brand comes up again at the top, you are definitely more likely to click on that link as the first exposure/impression has already created awareness of the brand in question.

In addition, organic searches in which you appear high on Internet searches (e.g. in Google ) are completely free. You only need to produce really good content! This doesn't have to cost so much a month for you to build your brand that leads to something that people are actually willing to find out more about and ultimately buy.

Want to learn more about how to get more organic impressions through SEO? Download our SEO guide by clicking here: DOWNLOAD THE SEO GUIDE 2021

The cooperation between us and Contitude is regular and fruitful with proper reporting. The professional staff has a proper overview of the work and sees opportunities and developments ahead.
Petra Hansson
Marketing Supervisor

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