page impression

A page impression is a metric that denotes the individual views of a web page. Each click generates a page impression without assigning a user.A page impression (PI) or page view refers to the view of a web page, the pure page view. As soon as your browser loads the HTML document on which a web page is based, a page impression is created. The individual call is counted in each case, a user can generate accordingly several page impressions.

The concept is easily countable and therefore a metric you can use well for an analysis of your website. In the case of commercially designed websites, the provider can use the page impressions in the form of a thousand contact price (TKP) or cost per mille (CPM) as a key figure, for example, in order to charge for placed advertising.

In the field of search engine optimization, the page impression gives an indication of how interesting your visitors find your website. Page views are recorded by search engine algorithms when creating their Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Not only human users of the websites can generate page impressions. When a crawler or bot calls up a web page, the server’s log file also counts this call as a page view.

Page impression in online advertising

The advertising industry uses this easy-to-measure key figure as the basis for its business model. Your user will see the advertisement as soon as he has accessed your page. Therefore you can assume that a page impression is also an ad impression . For this reason, providers also bill ad impressions in CPM.

Since you can display several ads on one web page, the number of ad impressions can be higher than the number of page impressions. For the advertising industry, this indicator is more of a quantitative variable that can be influenced in an attempt to achieve greater reach.

To optimize your Conversion Rate you should therefore not rely on page impress ions or ad impressions alone, but rather carry out special (re)targeting of your target group. For this, you can base your advertising campaign on cost per acquisition (CPA). This is where the concepts of page impression and conversion rate come together.

The well-known tools such as Google AdWords, Google Analytics or Bing Ads offer a billing of advertising according to the CPM model. Much more often, however, ads are charged by the number of clicks. Then, when you analyze your click through rate (CTR), you can see how successful your ad was in engaging your audience.

Problems of page impressions as a key figure

Since page views by crawlers are also counted in the server’s log file, the results can be falsified. If you want to distinguish the calls, you can only do that if you analyze the visitor sources or the hostname.

In the long run, you can watch the page impressions and if there is a sudden increase in views, you can assume that there are impressions coming from automated views. You can limit these automatic calls through various technical measures, such as using robots.txt.

customer journey

A conversion is preceded by a customer journey. This denotes the individual steps in the conversion funnel. These steps can denote finding the site, registering, purchasing or downloading. A distinction must be made here between the so-called lead. The lead is not the conversion, but is in front of it. It refers to the contact with which you address the user and is thus the prerequisite for conversion.

One danger here is bots, which can influence the conversion rate, especially in the case of downloads and newsletters. To counter this danger, you should pay attention to all the individual steps, the conversion funnel. Only this gives you an accurate, tamper-proof result for your effort.

After conversion, online marketing starts working on post conversion marketing, customer retention.

Page impressions and SEO

Page impressions give you an idea of how often your website and its subpages are actually being viewed. Even if you do everything right in terms of search engine optimization for your website, you will only achieve a high ranking in the SERPs through steady traffic to your site. Especially the relation between page impressions, bounce rate and dwell time on your website is valuable for your SEO. Many page impressions and a high bounce rate show you that you should optimize the design of your website.

Conclusion

Page impressions are an easy quantitative metric to track. They play an important role in the advertising industry, as they can easily be used to generate accounts – but the possibilities of the indicator are limited. To improve the reach of your site, you can use PI for ads. However, a better method here is specific targeting of the audience to reduce the wastage of your marketing. Only with other key performance indicators (KPIs) does the analytical significance of your page impressions increase. In relation to your bounce rate or the time spent on your website, you can gain valuable information and analyze the weaknesses of your site.