Page Impressions

Page impressions, briefly called PI, come from the field of web analytics. In English referred to as Page View, it denotes the page views of a website. Specifically, a page impression refers to the act of users accessing each individual page within an online presence.

Visit vs. Visitor

For better understanding, the Page Impressions should be contrasted with the Visits: This metric refers to the unique page view, meaning each time a visitor (Unique Visitor) accesses the website with a new IP address. If the visitor then clicks through several categories and articles, the Page Impressions are counted. With PI, there is no precise assignment of a visit to a visitor, but with a Visit, there is.

In online marketing, page impressions are an important metric because they form the basis for the marketing model known as the cost per thousand (CPT). In this model, a marketer pays a fixed price for a thousand contacts, i.e., a thousand users or visitors who access the website with the relevant advertising media. The CPT as a unit of measurement only allows quantitative conclusions, as it exclusively deals with a criterion for reach. Page impressions do not provide any insight into the effectiveness of the advertising medium, as neither the conversion is measured nor can it be determined whether a thousand visitors or 500 users were reached twice. To obtain relevant results here, page impressions must be supplemented with targeting or retargeting. In search engine advertising, ad impressions are used synonymously for page impressions.

Key figure for SEO: Page impressions outside of marketing

While page impressions have been downgraded in significance for modern marketing models in online marketing, they are useful in other areas of website optimization.

The page impression in search engine optimization provides insight, among other things, into how successfully individual subpages within a web presence perform. Based on these figures, decisions can be made regarding advertisements and banners. Furthermore, the impression provides insight into how attractive a website is from the user's perspective. If it is rarely clicked in search results or quickly abandoned after a brief visit, the website operator receives important information about the bounce rate and the quality of their content or the value of the content in relation to the search query. At the same time, automated access to the website can be detected when the number of page impressions increases unnaturally. In this way, various optimizations can also be performed in the SEO area based on the page impressions.