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I recently saw a digital agency promoting “Guaranteed Impressions” with their advertising plans.

$500 = 50,000 guaranteed impressions

What does this mean? Is it a good thing? Why don’t all agencies guarantee their ads like this?

Sure, guaranteed big numbers sounds like a good thing, but once you start to understand what those numbers mean, that guarantee quickly erodes into an indicator that you’re about to be duped. What’s even worse, tactics like this distract from focusing on your business’s goals and instead focus on the agency’s goals. You need to find someone to really elevate your website and make sure that people are actually interested in going onto it. You may want to speak to a professional like Trevor Tynes, SEO Consultant in Sarnia, for example, or someone closer to where you are, so you can discuss tactics and organic results that can work for you in a positive and productive way.

• What is an Impression?
  • As Investopedia defines it: An impression is a metric used to quantify the number of digital views or engagements of a piece of content.
• What are Impressions used for?
  • In marketing, Impressions are used to measure the effectiveness of a campaign where the objective is to reach as many people as possible. *When properly implemented, ‘Top of Funnel‘ marketing can be used very effectively to impact actions further down the funnel: website traffic, engagements, and ultimately sales.
• Are more Impressions always better?
  • Yes, *when the ad campaign is properly implemented.

So, what should you do instead?

What to know

You should always have a plan in place. Before starting any marketing campaign, make sure that you have a marketing plan that lays out key points and objectives:

• Know your business objectives
  • What are your objectives?
    • Online sales
    • In store foot traffic
    • Leads / sign-ups
    • Product / service announcements
• Take a hard look at your current marketing positions.
  • In marketing, Impressions are used to measure the effectiveness of a campaign where the objective is to reach as many people as possible. *When properly implemented, ‘Top of Funnel’ marketing can be used very effectively to impact actions further down the funnel: website traffic, engagements, and ultimately sales.
• Know your current status
  • Take a hard look at your current marketing positions
    • Are you a brand new store that no one knows is open yet?
    • Do you have a great existing customer base, but want to expand into new products, services, or areas?
    • Are your conversions rates lower than they should be?
  • Knowing your current position will help you plan the path forward.
• Take a hard look at your current marketing positions
  • In marketing, Impressions are used to measure the effectiveness of a campaign where the objective is to reach as many people as possible. *When properly implemented, ‘Top of Funnel’ marketing can be used very effectively to impact actions further down the funnel: website traffic, engagements, and ultimately sales.
• Know how to measure success
  • You can’t manage what you don’t measure!
  • Defining the right metrics for your objectives will keep you focused and on track.
• Know your target market
  • Proper targeting is crucial. Too broad of a targeting spec will get you a lot of impressions, but they are worthless if they are outside of your geographical market, or are people who would never purchase from you.
    • If you’re selling left handed screwdrivers, you don’t need to target all the righties.
• Know how to work the Funnel to your advantage
  • Using the Marketing Funnel methodology will help you balance your ad campaign objectives between Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions.
  • Budgeting and Sales forecasting also benefits from knowing how each aspect of the funnel affects conversion rates,ROAS, and the value of each visitor.

If an agency is promising you results based on a single metric, it likely means they don’t care about you or your business and only want to do what is easiest for them.

To read more tips and techniques from the staff at Engage121, please visit our blog here. For more information about our eCommerce Accelerator™ or to subscribe to our weekly digital marketing tips newsletter please sign-up here.

About the Author
Mike Burns heads up the Digital Marketing account group at Engage121, helping the account team develop winning strategies for our clients. Whn not brewing up successful digital marketing campaigns, Mike likes to brew his own beer and invent new ways to make flannel relevant.