Advertising Metrics 101: What Views, Impressions, and Clicks Say About Your Campaign

Views, impressions, and clicks are key metrics for every digital marketer. Here’s how to use them to tell if your campaign is killing it.

Key takeaways:

• Views happen when somebody visits your content, impressions are how often somebody sees your ad, and clicks are how often somebody clicks through the ad
• Impressions lead to clicks, and clicks lead to views
• Views, clicks, and impressions are all critical parts of getting leads and scoring sales
• You can see your profit generation by calculating profit per impression (PPI)
• The end game is getting your content seen, so it’s critical to start with kickass content

Content is the core of your digital marketing campaign, and the only way to know it’s working is by keeping a close handle on the metrics.

Got a killer ad campaign going and want to know how it’s performing? You’re not going to make heads or tails of your data until you understand views, impressions, and clicks. Only then will you know what’s working and what needs a little boost.

Let’s take a look at what these metrics are, what they mean for data collection, and how they impact your campaigns.

What are impressions, views, and clicks?

Before we go too far, it’s important to know what these 3 terms really mean. Here’s the quick and dirty explanation of what they are:

• Impressions are when somebody sees your ad. Regardless of whether they interacted with it, an impression means your ad landed in front of a set of eyes.
• Clicks show when somebody clicks on the ad.
• Views are when somebody actually looks at the content.

Impressions lead to clicks

An impression happens when an ad renders on somebody’s digital screen. You can use impressions as a first-line metric to see how often your pay-per-click ads are showing up in response to searches or how often your ad shows up on a third-party website.

Impressions come in two varieties:

• Served impressions: These impressions happen any time somebody loads your ad content. However, there’s a problem. All served impressions tell you is that the ad loaded, and they don’t tell you whether somebody actually saw your ad.
• Viewable impressions: This type of impression excludes any counts where the user probably didn’t see the ad content. That means if an ad blocker was active, somebody scrolled before the ad loaded, or a broken plugin made it impossible to see the ad, that’s not counted.

Viewable impressions are more accurate when tracking how many people see your ad, not just how many times the ad is loading or being served. The data is more actionable, too, so you can modify your ad if there’s a problem causing it to be served and not seen.

The goal of each impression is to turn it into a click. You want people to interact with your content, and that all starts when they click through. That means it’s super important for your ads to have a strong and compelling call-to-action, so those impressions have a fighting chance of turning into a click.

Clicks lead to views

After somebody clicks through, the goal is for them to view your content, whether that means watching a video or reading a landing page.

Views are the number of times visitors engage with your content. Most of the time, views refer to video views, though they can refer to page views too.

The most important view metrics include:

• View rate: This is the number of views divided by the number of times your content is displayed.

• Watch time: This is how many seconds viewers spend watching a video ad.

• Average impression time: This is the number of seconds the average viewer spends actively viewing the content per impression.

• Average cost per view (CPV): This is the amount you pay when a viewer watches your video or engages with your content.

See your profit per impression

The ultimate metric for your paid advertising campaign success is profit by impression (PBI).

You can calculate PBI by dividing your overall profit by the number of impressions your campaign reeled in. (Get that overall profit metric by subtracting total cost from total sales value.)

Pay-per-click campaigns are all about boosting profit by generating more views, clicks, and conversions at the best price you can. With PBI, you can determine which ads to keep running and which ones to nix.

Getting leads and scoring sales 

Ultimately, views score you leads, and leads score you sales.

But you can’t get those views without impressions and clicks. Impressions boost brand awareness by getting your product or service in front of more people. That means your ad content needs to be tailored to the people interested in your business – your ideal target customer.

Then, you have to take relevancy into account.

Impressions are a good measure of how good you are at putting your ad in front of an audience, and clicks are a good indicator of whether you’re succeeding at putting your ad in front of the right audience. But if your content isn’t relevant to the ad, then you can expect your views to stall, which puts a wrench in the whole campaign.

Impressions, clicks, and views can tell you why your sales and leads are exploding, or why they’re lackluster.

Hint: It’s always your content.

If your clicks suck, then your ad CTA isn’t sharp or compelling enough. When your views are through the floor, the end content isn’t worth the viewer’s time.

That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on your PPC metrics and ensure that your campaign starts and ends with extraordinary content. 

Good metrics start with even better content 

The end game is getting views, which only happens if you have great content. And we’re talking about every part of the campaign, not just the end content the user is landing on.

That’s right, your ad copy needs to be kickass, or all those impressions will go to absolutely nothing of use.

No wonder you need a partner like ContentBacon. When you partner with us, you get content that blows away anything you’ve commissioned from a third-party freelancer (or written yourself). 

We create content that captures the audience from the beginning and holds their attention until the very end, leaving them feeling like they got something of real value.

Check out our subscriptions to see what goodies we’ve got for you.