"Impressions" were a unit of currency invented by the people who sell impressions. Here's what to use instead.
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"Impressions" were a unit of currency invented by the people who sell impressions. Here's what to use instead.
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Impressions were invented by the people who sell impressions. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's how the unit got into your marketing reports. A century ago, somebody in the advertising business needed to charge for newspaper ads, and they didn't have a way to count "how many people actually read this." So they invented a number for "how many people might have seen it," called it an impression, and started billing. Everyone agreed to pretend the number meant something. It worked for a while. Then television came. Then digital. Then mobile. Then social. Every time the medium changed, the industry kept the same trick: invent a unit of "might have," bill for it, call it data. Every one of those numbers, ad views, clicks, engagement, reach, is a guess about whether a human was paying attention. None of them is a human paying for your product. Here's what most marketers eventually realize, usually around year 10: The number of ad views you bought has almost no relationship to the number of customers you got. You can prove this for yourself. Pull last quarter's ad numbers. Pull last quarter's revenue. Try to draw a line between them. The line wobbles. So what do you do? You stop buying ad views. You start paying for real customers. A customer is a real person who showed up at your store, stayed 10+ minutes, took photos, and bought something at your register. Not a flicker on a screen. Not a guess. A person. With a receipt, a real one, printed by your own register. That's harder to fake than an ad view. It says the loudest thing marketing has ever said: a real person paid real money for your product. We've verified over 230,000 visits. Each one cost a business $24.99, plus the item bought at cost. Each one is a real customer in a real store. Zero ad views. Zero clicks. Zero engagement numbers. The impression had a good run. It outlived its usefulness about 20 years ago. We just kept paying for it out of habit. The receipt is the new unit. Pay only when a real person walks in and buys. Get refunded when they don't. The impression is dead. We just haven't held the funeral yet. Brad Co Founder and CEO, Eveoy