"Impression" (within PPC context) = views, presentations, or rotational position .... basically how many times your "banner/ad" is seen or put in front of Search Clients on the Search Page
OR how many 'placements' your banner has been distributed to (other places your banner is positioned in order to be seen), which is some PPC programs allows your ad/banner to be re-distributed to other websites for potential conversion (use, to be clicked on).
Think of a magazine: a single issue with one ad may mean that there will probably be 4-7 impressions per issue, knowing that that is the average number of people to read each magazine .... and with a publication/distribution of 100,000, the potential impressions per ad may be estimated at 500,000 ...... PPC placements in rotation are called "impressions" and I always question the means by which these numbers are determined: what facts are collected opposed to being simply assumed? I ask for a list to prove placements, or analystics to demonstrate true positioning to provide time/duration of impression value. "Click-Thru" is different than 'Impression' in so far as it is the actual click on your banner or ad that delivers a visitor to the destination desired (your site) .... Click-thru's are the actual measurable metric of a Pay Per Click program, delivering genuine unique visitors (hard traffic) to your website in hopes of eliciting "conversion" (making a visitor a client via a bona-fide transaction/sale).
Click-thru is what you are paying for, and why your balance is debited each time traffic is generated by a visitor clicking on your impression....and why there is so much concern about validating traffic (making sure it is not created by bots, spiders, or automated utilities --- even competitors!) PPC programs may or may not be a worthy investment: it is hard to justify the numbers of directed traffic to the rate of conversion if all they do is deliver a page visitor ...... how much are you willing to "bet" that your site is effective enough to create "conversion" that you are willing to pay for random, unfiltered traffic?
Although some may argue that for new sites PPC works to drive up hard-core metric traffic values (SE's respect actual traffic, not just 'page views'), the major handicap of PPC is that the traffic that is created using these 'artificial means' is not sustainable, nor are websites implementing such traffic strategies capable of evolving effectively to retain a significant position after such a jumpstart due to natural, hard-core metrics on their own (proper Content development, META, relevancy, link strategies, etc.)! IMO. 
04-29-2008, 10:36 PM
impression 
Re: impression 
