What are Facebook Impressions? (your complete guide)
Facebook has more than 40 metrics for advertisers to view. As you might imagine, this is very complicated for advertisers. However, it does help to understand these metrics.
Impressions are one of these metrics. Read on to discover this indicator and how to use it.
What are Facebook Impressions?
A Facebook impression is the number of times your content appears on a user’s screen. However, this does not represent the number of people who saw your post, as one person can count as multiple impressions. Having said that, this is a good metric to compare with engagement and reach.
Read on to learn more about how impressions compare to other metrics.
What is an impression on Facebook?
Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed on the screen. All impressions are counted, which means it’s not necessarily how many people viewed your post.
Sometimes the same person can view an ad on multiple screens, which will be considered multiple impressions.
So it’s not the same as “reach,” which is a measure of how many people saw the post.
In short, every time your ad appears on screen, it counts as an impression. However, this metric only counts one impression per screen. Multiple displays on the same screen will not count.
However, this is per screen, not per person.
If someone looks at their phone and your ad appears, it counts as an impression. If the same person looks at their desktop and reappears, that’s another impression.
Are Facebook Views the Same as Impressions?
Honestly, it depends. If your content is a video, the number of impressions and views will be different. If a video appears in someone’s newsfeed, it counts as an impression. However, the video actually has to be watched to get views.
As a result, most videos will have more impressions than views. Not everyone who sees a video on their feed will watch it, which means you won’t get views per impression.
Also, pageviews cannot be higher than impressions. If the video never appears in their feed, the viewer will not be able to watch the video.
However, for posts, views are the same as impressions. Facebook doesn’t have a metric for how long someone viewed a post, and there’s no way to know if someone read a post. So, in this case, the two metrics are the same.
What is the difference between impressions and engagement on Facebook?
When your post appears on someone’s newsfeed and they scroll past it, it counts as an impression. However, participation requires someone to interact with the video.
Views, comments, and reactions are usually seen as interactions. If someone watches the video, it is considered participation. Comments and reactions count towards all post types, including videos.
However, someone cannot participate twice. If someone likes and comments on a video, that’s an engagement. In other words, this metric is per person, not the total number of likes and comments you receive.
As such, engagement is often considered “better” than impression. If you get a lot of impressions but few engagements, this could be a sign that users aren’t engaging with your post.
However, your impressions always outweigh your engagements. After all, it’s impossible for users to engage with something they can’t see.
How many impressions are good for Facebook ads?
Impressions are the number of times an ad pops up on the screen. As you can imagine, it’s a numbers game. The longer your ad appears, the higher the likelihood that someone will interact with it.
However, keep in mind that impressions are the number of times your ad is displayed on the screen. So just because you have 1,000 impressions doesn’t mean 1,000 people saw it.
Typically, engagement is measured per 1,000 impressions. Therefore, 1,000 impressions is a typical count.
However, impressions are not a great indicator of ad success. For example, if you have a wide audience, your impressions may be very high. However, you probably won’t get much engagement or make more sales with this strategy.
Ideally, you want high engagement per impression.
Why are my pageviews higher than my impressions?
While this is rare, your pageviews may be higher than your impressions. Impressions are created when a video appears on a newsfeed.
So if they access your video from somewhere other than the news feed, it will only be counted as a single view.
Not all instances of a visitor visiting a video count as an impression, but each view counts as a view.
So, if you have more views than impressions, it means your video is getting a lot of direct search and link activity.
Fortunately, this is usually a good thing. It shows that users are sharing or searching for a link to your video, which is often better than simply viewing it on the newsfeed. This means that users are interested enough to search for it.
What is more important? Reach or Impressions?
Both of these are very important. You’ll gain the most knowledge by comparing the two metrics – rather than simply picking one to focus on.
Arriving requires interaction. Someone must interact with your video to count as reach. However, showing only requires the post to appear on someone’s newsfeed — no matter how fast they scroll.
To learn more, you can also read our posts on Facebook Insights, Facebook Instant Articles and Facebook ID.
in conclusion
At first glance, impressions may look very similar to other metrics. However, there are some subtle differences.
Simply put, an impression is the number of times your content appears on someone’s screen. All screens are important and everyone can count towards multiple impressions. So it’s not a count of how many people viewed your post.
You can compare this metric with other metrics to see how often your post grabs someone’s attention or gets scrolled past.
