Social Impressions: What do they really mean?

Over the years Marketing has evolved tremendously, and with the addition of new methods often comes confusion in terminology. Recently, I was asked this, "What is an 'impression' anyway?"

In traditional advertising terms, an "impression" is a measurement of how many people an advertisement can reach, often measured by the audience size. When you are talking about television or radio, this definition of the term makes sense because you are measuring how many people the advertisement might have been exposed to, not how many actually saw it. However, as marketing has changed to incorporate the potential of online media, the term "impression" has taken on a new meaning.

In a Web 2.0 world, an "impression" became well-known as a measurement of how many times an advertising placement would be served up on a web site. Then, along came social media into the mix, and the word "impression" became even more confusing, taking on yet another meaning. When used in reference to email marketing, video, and social media, the term "impression" has become widely used as a descriptor for the end-user action.

Why the marketing lesson today you might ask? Here at Delivra we are often asked about the measurement and tracking analytics behind our platform and it is important to understand the differences among the metrics. First, email marketing uses these basic definitions:

Open: registered when the recipient either previews or opens the email (very similar to the "impression" metric for an online ad).
Click-Through: registered when the recipient clicks any link within the email.
Unique Open or Unique Clickthrough: the total number of recipients who opened or clicked, without regard to how many times they opened or clicked.

Beyond these standard measurements, we added additional metrics when we introduced our social media sharing functionality. We wanted a way for our customers to embed social sharing links within their emails to make the content sharing process easy for their recipients. Now that email marketers are incorporating this feature in their campaigns, it's time to circle back and talk about how to understand the tracking behind it--including "impressions"--and how three simple metrics can affect your future marketing efforts:

First, once content in an email is shared to a social network, our social tracking enables the sender to view exactly which recipients are sharing.
Second, they are able to see exactly how many times that content has been shared out to each network.
Third, they can see how many "impressions" occur once the content is shared--how many people, beyond the email recipients, viewed the email content as a result of it being shared on a social network.

How can you can apply these metrics? Once you know who within your database is sharing content, you can tailor future communications and incentives to encourage further sharing activity. Even more powerful is knowing which networks they are sharing to. If you know the majority of your audience is sharing to Facebook, then focus your marketing efforts to that audience. Provide incentives within that network and encourage those members to become fans of your organization.

As for the almighty impression, let's look at an example. Drumroll, please...

Suppose you have an email campaign that you send to 10,000 recipients. Of those 10,000 recipients, 5% (or 500) share the email content with their social networks. Of that 500 that shared, 80% (or 400) shared to Facebook. If the average Facebook member has over 125 friends, the link to that shared content was seen by potentially 50,000 friends. If just 2% of those friends click the link and view the content, that's 1,000 "impressions"--additional people that took action to click and read more.

That's powerful when you think about it. With social media, you compound your reach when your recipients share out content. In addition, you are potentially also attracting new fans, customers, and prospects during this process. In fact, you may even gain subscribers when all is said and done.

Still think social media is a waste of time? I sure don't! Have questions or want to learn more? Contact us today at 317-915-9400 or at info@delivra.com.

Carissa Newton | Marketing