In website marketing, the terms impression and click come up more often than others. As a business or company that uses website marketing, it is imperative to be knowledgeable in what these terms mean and the differences between the two. Depending on your business, you want to make sure that you are optimizing your online ads for the best return and payoff on your investments. In this article, you will learn about impressions vs clicks and what the differences are between impressions and clicks. 
Table of Contents
What Are Impressions?
An impression, also known as a view-through, is when a user sees an advertisement. An impression occurs any time a user opens an app or website and the advertisement is visible. Ad impressions are simply the number of times your ad has been exposed to a potential viewer. This includes when it appears as a banner, button, or text link. As an advertiser, this is the least advantageous way to purchase advertising.
What Are Clicks?
A click is whenever a user actually clicks on your ads, which demonstrates interest in the ad. This is the most advantageous way to purchase advertising as an advertiser because it takes all the guesswork out of the equation. With clicks, you’ll have the ability to see exactly how many visitors will visit your site relative to the ad purchase. Once the end-user is on your website, it should be engaging and interactive enough to generate some sort of emotion to make contact with your company or business.
Difference Between Impressions and Clicks
It’s important to understand impressions vs clicks because it will make a difference when you’re looking at doing a pay-per-click campaign.
Facebook Relevance
While clicks and impressions are the currency of ads in most places, Facebook throws a curveball into the mix with optimized cost per mile, also known as OCPM. With OCPM, which is identical to CPM, paying for impressions, the biggest difference is taking advantage of Facebook’s platform. Rather than blindly dumping your budget into the first thousand or so people who see your ad, Facebook tries to optimize your budget. It finds people who are most likely to actually click your ads, even though you’re paying by the impression, not the click. There’s been discussion as to whether CPM or OCPM is more effective. Some people assume that OCPM is worse because it removes control from your campaign and forces you to put trust in Facebook, hoping that they know where to best spend your money. Others take the time to test each path. With Facebook, regular CPM is going to be very cheap, but the least effective. OCPM is much more expensive, but also more effective. 
DIY Optimization
On any platform other than Facebook, you’re going to have to choose between the cheap and ineffective CPM and the effective but tricky CPC. In this situation, CPC is the winner as long as it’s done right. With CPC, you have the potential to put a large sum of money into it with no returns. However, it’s not difficult to optimize your ads and maximize your CPC returns.Start with broad targeting and narrow it down over time. If you start with 100 keywords to target, then from there you find the 10 best. If you start with 10, you might only find one or two effective keywords. Don’t abandon keywords just because they don’t work right away. There may be seasonal fluctuations or simply out of style at that moment. You should also make use of negative keywords whenever possible to eliminate the possibility of showing your ad for queries involving your keyword but unrelated to your product.Also, make use of geographic components in your ads, keeping in mind various traits of your location, such as climate and local events. Next, you’ll want to test different placements for different ads to see if one placement works better than another. You can also test different copy, and, when relevant, images. You can run a number of variations at a time.Pay attention to your quality score when using Google CPC, which will affect your bid amount and the placement of your ads. This will help you decide when it’s time to stop testing and start investing in your best performers fully. There are many ways you can optimize your ads, but a lot of it comes down to testing, experimentation, iteration, and repetition.
What is Click-Through Rate?
Now that you have an understanding of impressions vs clicks and what the differences between them are, you can understand click-through rate, also known as CTR. Click-through rate is essentially the number of clicks you receive divided by the number of impressions you get. This gives you the percentage of viewers who click through and view your content. In order to maximize your web traffic, you want to improve your click-through rate as much as possible so that more people are interacting with your brand on a consistent basis.
What is Pay-Per-Click?
Pay-per-click, also known as PPC, is a pricing strategy for advertising packages that you might purchase. When using a strategy involving PPC, you pay for every click your advertising receives. This is different from the CPM (cost per mille), where you pay for every thousand impressions that your ad receives, regardless of how many people clicked it. PPC ads help grow a new business or create brand awareness, as well as grow an established company’s online presence. Advertisers run these ads on search engines like Google and Bing, and they pay every time someone clicks on their ad. PPC ads are displayed when someone types in a keyword or phrase in a search engine. The ads are found at the top of the search engine results page above the organic search results and will say “ad” to the left of the advertisements. 
With PPC advertising, there are several different types of PPC ads. These include:
Search Ads
These are the most common type of PPC ad. Advertisers choose keywords that they want their ads to display when the word is searched in a search engine. With PPC ads, an auction system is used where an advertiser determines how much they are willing to pay each time someone clicks on the ad and set a maximum bid for what they are willing to pay. Advertisers can bid on a single keyword or a group of keywords.
Display Ads
These ads are made up of images, text, or video. This type of advertisement encourages the user to click on the ad, which usually takes them to a landing page where they can take a specific action such as making a purchase or signing up for a service.
Video Ads
Video ads are a great way to reach people who are not currently aware of your business or brand, and they are a great way to gain followers.
Remarketing Ads
These ads are sent to people who already visited your website or showed interest in your product or service. These ads also target people who almost purchased your product.
Shopping Ads
Shopping ads include a picture with the advertised product, the price, title, and description of the product. A shopping campaign is more profitable than PPC advertising because the conversion rate is higher.
Paid Social Ads
These ads are easy to find on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. These platforms offer PPC advertising, and Instagram PPC is easy to manage through Facebook PPC because Facebook owns Instagram. You can create several campaigns on paid social platforms, which allow a variety of ad types with various size options. Many social platforms also allow you to create both PPC video and image ads.
Gmail Sponsored Ads
These ads are a way to advertise on Gmail, and you have the ability to manage or create these ads within Google Ads. Google campaigns such as search, shopping, and display can easily branch out to Gmail sponsored ads. Advertisers can also add three metrics to their Google ads to see how well their Gmail-sponsored ads are doing. 
Importance of Impressions
The simple explanation of why impressions are important to mobile marketing: a popular method of purchasing advertising is by the number of impressions vs clicks an advertisement generated. Generally charged on a CPM basis, advertising formats tend to charge per thousand impressions. This means that it is essential for advertisers to know how many impressions a CPM advertising generates in order to understand campaign cost. In a broader sense, impressions are important because they provide a simple representation of how many people are seeing your ads. Calculating the number of impressions a campaign generates is also one of the simplest ways to discover how far an advertising channel actually reaches. Knowing how many impressions an advertising campaign generates helps marketers determine other marketing metrics such as click-through rates. These metrics are used to calculate a campaign’s effectiveness, but require an accurate impression count to be successfully measured.
FAQ:
- What are impressions?
- What are clicks?
- Why are impressions important?
- How do I get impressions?
- What does pay-per-click advertising mean?
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