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Digital Marketing & SEO vocabulary · Paid Search and Advertising

Impression

Meaning in digital marketing & SEO, with examples

/ɪmˈpreʃən/nounCore term

In digital marketing & SEO, impression means: A single time an ad, post or search result is shown on someone's screen, whether or not the person clicks or even notices it.

In Turkish: gösterim

How it is used

A basic metric in every ad platform and in Google Search Console. Campaigns get or generate impressions, and costs are often counted per thousand impressions (CPM). Do not confuse it with reach, which counts people, not views.

Example sentences

  1. The video ad got 200,000 impressions but very few clicks.

  2. Impressions dropped after we lowered the daily budget.

Common collocations

  • get impressions
  • impression share
  • cost per thousand impressions
  • total impressions
  • reachThe number of different people who saw a piece of content or an ad at least once during a period.
  • click-through rateThe percentage of people who click a link, ad or email after seeing it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.
  • CPMShort for cost per mille: the price an advertiser pays for one thousand impressions of an ad. 'Mille' is Latin for thousand.
  • PPCShort for pay-per-click: an advertising model in which the advertiser pays each time someone clicks an ad, not when the ad is shown.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Paid Search and Advertising

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