One of the most basic metrics provided by Google Analytics when reporting on your paid advertising campaigns is the number of impressions. We will further explore what this metric means and how it can help your marketing strategy.
First of all, it’s important to mention that it’s best to look into this metric and its complementary ones (clicks and positions) using a more specialised tool from Google, like the Google Search Console or Google AdWords (known as Google Ads). But, as Analytics can be integrated with the other tools, you can use it to track your impressions as well.
Second of all, you need to determine what kind of impressions you want to measure: is it the number of impressions for a paid ad or a search result? Do you need to filter the results by certain keywords or for a time interval? Google Analytics can help with that.
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What Are Impressions?
Position, impression, and click are three of the statuses a search result or a paid ad can have. Knowing more about these metrics helps you understand how well your ads or web pages are performing, and drive you to make improvements. The number of impressions is used to calculate the click-through rate by showing you how many number of clicks you get from a certain number of impressions.
Impressions by themselves are not a valuable metric, but they are very useful in correlation with others.
How to See Impressions in Google Analytics?
To see impressions and clicks in Google Analytics, you have to go to the Behavior tab. You will see an overview of these metrics under the Events tab. Here you will see ad impressions and clicks given in a certain time frame.
The flexibility of these analytics is not great, as Google Ads is more fit for reporting on the performance of your paid ads.
You can also use Google Analytics to check organic results as long as you integrate the Search Console with Analytics.
Let’s go into more detail about each type of impression you can track using Google Analytics.
Search Result Impressions
The best way to get accurate data about the search impressions in your Google Analytics tool is to add the Google Search Console data to it. Search results impressions measure how many times your landing page appeared on a search results page. Together with position and clicks, this information tells you how visible you are in SERPs and what you could improve to rank higher.
Ad Impressions
Ad impressions represent how many times your ad was shown in ad networks. This will be used to calculate your click-through rate and determine the cost of your ad campaigns. Again, it’s more accurate to use Google Ads for reporting, as Google Analytics measures these metrics differently.
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