Impression

Each time your Internet ad is displayed on a computer monitor, this is known as an Impression. Many Internet marketing companies allow you to pay for advertising on either a per Impression basis or a pay per click. If you pay per click you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and the Hyperlink takes them to your website. If you pay for ads per Impression, you agree to pay a set amount each time the ad is displayed, whether someone clicks on it or not. Pay per Impression ads are usually sold for a thousand impressions at a time, on a Cost Per Thousand (CPM) basis.

Usually the amount companies charge for each Impression is much cheaper than for each click. Whether this ends up saving your company money or being an effective internet marketing tool or not depends on how often your ad Impressions turn into clicks and then into sales. If none of the Impressions ever turn into sales, well… you get the idea.

Impressions are tracked and tallied on website servers. A real web visitor may not actually see each Impression though, since sometimes you need to scroll down to see the ads, particularly when viewing on small screens like iPhones. Each time a webpage containing your ad is downloaded from the server, it counts as an Impression, regardless of whether the section of the page containing the ad or link is actually ever viewed.