One of the key metrics (statistics) used in the marketing world is “impressions.” This it the (theoretical) number of eyeball-pairs (or pairs of ears) that are going to see (or hear) your marketing message.
That “theoretical” is there because you can’t really know. One glossary gives the definition as the number of people who have the opportunity to see your ad. But do they?
You place an ad in a magazine that has a circulation of 250,000. Your ad is on page 32. How many of those 250,000 copies are ever opened to page 32?
5000 postcards go out to Dentists. How many of them are thrown away by the Front Desk, never get seen by the Office Manager let alone the Doctor?
The same applies to most forms of marketing. People go to get a snack during the TV commercials, never look up as they drive past the billboard.
One reason the Internet keeps rising in importance in the marketing world, its version of impressions is actually pretty accurate. If your stats program is properly designed, 2000 page views means that page was on someone’s screen 2000 times.
“Properly designed” means it has to detect and eliminate from its count, visits by robots (search engines visiting the site to index it, plus various types of spammers and hackers). One problem with free stats programs is none of them do this well.
So take impressions as a raw number that has to be interpreted in order to judge its value. Of course that starts with are you reaching the correct public? You sell to companies with vehicle fleets. A mailing list of companies that own 5 or more vehicles, is going to be a lot more useful than one of any old company of any size.
An ad in a paid magazine will always get more actual views per thousand impressions, than a similar free magazine. Why? You’re paying for it, you’re likely to read more of it. Plus impressions in free magazines and newspapers are simply the number of copies printed, who knows if anyone ever even picks them all up.
Then there’s placement. Two billboards may be located on the same stretch of road, and hence, get the same number of impressions. But one is located directly in Northbound drivers’ line of sight. The other is way off angle for any driver.
An ad on the back cover of a magazine is going to be seen by a lot more people than one on an interior page, towards the back, with no article on the page or its opposite page. In fact, a back cover ad will often be seen by more people than the circulation, because someone doesn’t necessarily have to read or even pick up the magazine to see the ad.
Oh yeah, and impressions can be falsified. I know of a magazine – no longer in existence, no surprise there – in which ads never seemed to produce results. Turns out the publisher was lying about the number of copies he was printing and distributing.
So impressions is a useful concept. But it’s only a starting point.