Sorting Out Clicks, Impressions & More for Successful SEM

Navigating the data that a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign produces can be a little tricky for those who don’t have much experience with it or simply don’t have much time to learn about it. Even some of the most basic terms like clicks and impressions can easily be misinterpreted and must be put in the correct context to make sense. I’ll discuss the correct way of analyzing these metrics in a second, but first, I’d like to begin by defining them and highlighting some common misconceptions and incorrect conclusions can be drawn from them.

Impressions

Every time an ad is loaded on a web page that is being viewed by a unique visitor, an impression is generated. This does not mean that the person consciously read the ad or even looked at it. It’s kind of like standing in front of a community bulletin board at a coffee shop. You might read a few of the flyers, but most of them you ignore. If that bulletin were a web page and you were a visitor, all of those ads would have received an impression even if you, the visitor, didn’t actually read them.

Some people think that an impression is the same thing as a view. Although all views of an ad are impressions, not all impressions are views. An impression does not necessarily mean that someone hovered over an ad with their mouse, read an ad, or clicked on an ad.

Clicks

At the center of the SEM universe is the click. Nearly everything revolves around it to some degree or another because it’s the most common thing Internet advertisers pay for. It’s obvious to most that a click is defined as any time an advertisement is clicked on by a user. However a click does not always translate into someone viewing a website that an ad is linked to.

Although a user almost always views a site after click an ad, there are some users who click ads to open a page up in a new tab and never ends up looking at it or simply close the page before the ad even loads. In either case, a click is generated without the user actually spending much time at all with the website being advertised.

If you think about clicks more in depth, you’ll find that impressions are a necessary prerequisite. The number of impressions generated by an SEM campaign will always be greater than or equal to the number of clicks generated by that same campaign. This is because every click requires an impression in order to occur. This is also how the metric click-through rate (CTR) is derived. Clicks divided by impressions equals CTR, which tells you how effective your ads are at a) catching the attention of a user and b) convincing them to visit your website.

Conversions

Ultimately, the litmus test of whether an SEM campaign has done its job or not is how many conversions it generated. A conversion is a relatively loose term used to describe a variety of things a website seeks to accomplish through marketing. A conversion can be the purchase of a pair of socks online, a download of a whitepaper on some new software, or a request for more information about a real estate listing.

Each conversion has a value attached to it maybe it’s the revenue of a product sold in a store or an estimate of how much potential a lead holds for profit. Either way it is an essential part of the goal of SEM: to generate as many conversions as possible at a cost that allows a company to net a profit.

Conversions do require action on the part of a visitor to a website beyond simply navigating through it. It also requires a visitor to view a page on a website that contains a conversion tracking script. These scripts are hidden to the naked eye, but are visible when looking at a website’s HTML source code. They are used on confirmation pages and thank you pages that a visitor sees once they’ve completed a desired action.

Tying it all together

I hope by now you are starting to understand that there’s a definite hierarchy to evaluating what successful SEM truly means. Information about impressions and clicks can tell you a little about how well your SEM campaign is doing, but conversions are still the most powerful success indicator.

With that being said, take clicks and impressions with a grain of salt. Yes, they measure the reach a campaign has and how much traffic it generates, but they lack important qualitative traits that will help you analyze what you are truly getting out of SEM. At IMAVEX, we focus our efforts on generating high-quality conversions for our clients who have SEM campaigns. With this approach, our clients are blown away with the value they get from SEM. If you’re interested in improving your existing SEM campaigns or just running campaigns for the very first time, contact us today. We’d love to help you out.