How it's used

Impressions is a common metric used by the online marketing industry. Impressions measure how often your ads were served to or seen by your audience.

How it's calculated

This metric is calculated as the number of times an ad was served, based on data received from an ad platform. Impressions can also be measured as on-screen or viewable depending on how each platform counts impressions, and may not be the same for all platforms.

Impressions are only reported for ad platforms that you've set up view tags for. Impressions for Facebook and Facebook-owned platforms are reported automatically and are counted as the number of times your ads were on screen. Impressions from third-party ad platforms cannot be verified by Facebook as on-screen or viewable, and may be disproportionately represented in reporting. For example, if an ad platform reports impressions served, then there may appear to be more in comparison to an ad platform that reports on-screen impressions.

This metric does not exclude impressions that were the result of fraud. Compare to Impressions served to a person to see the number of times our measurement system verified that an ad was served to a person.

All impressions are classified as paid touchpoints.

Related metrics

• Impressions served to a person
• Measurable Impressions
• On-Screen Impressions
• Waste Impressions

Further reading

• About attribution
• About attribution models
• Analysing attribution results