Ad impressions
An ad impression is one showing of an ad to someone, counted whether or not they click it.
An ad impression is one showing of an ad. Each time an ad appears on someone's screen, that's one impression, whether they click it, ignore it or scroll straight past. Ad platforms use impressions to report reach and, often, to charge for it, as a price per thousand impressions.
For a marketer, impressions are the top of the funnel. They tell you how often your ad had a chance to be seen. On their own they say nothing about whether anyone cared, so read them next to clicks and what happened after.
How impressions are counted
Every ad platform defines an impression a little differently, such as how much of the ad must be on screen and for how long. So impressions from two platforms aren't always comparable. If the same person sees your ad three times, that's three impressions and one person reached.
For example, if Kestrel Roasters' ad is shown 20,000 times in a week and clicked 300 times, its click-through rate works out at 1.5%. The 20,000 is the impressions. Fewer different people saw it, and the platform reports that number separately as reach.
Ad impressions in AI answers
Ads now appear inside AI assistants too. ChatGPT, for example, shows ads next to some of its answers. That adds a new question for brands: who pays to appear next to the answers your customers read, and are you named in those answers or only in the ad?
Keep ad impressions apart from organic visibility. An ad next to an answer is a paid placement. Being named in the answer is the platform's own choice, and it's what most of your AI search work is about.
Ad impressions in AnswerOrbit
Ads shows which brands advertise next to ChatGPT's answers to your prompts. For each advertiser you'll see how many times its ads were seen, how many different ads it ran and its ad share, where every showing of an ad counts once. You'll also see ad coverage, the share of your ChatGPT answers that showed an ad at all. See Ads.