Impressions

The total number of times your brand appears in front of potential customers across all channels.

Impressions

Impressions

definition

Impressions measure how many times your content, ads, or outreach messages are displayed to potential customers. This includes paid ad impressions, organic social views, email sends, and outbound calls or messages.

Unlike reach, which counts unique people, impressions count every single view. One person seeing your ad three times equals three impressions.

Impressions sit at the very top of your growth funnel. Without impressions, nothing else happens. No clicks, no leads, no revenue. But impressions alone mean nothing. A million impressions with zero clicks is a waste of budget.

The goal is not to maximise impressions. The goal is to generate enough impressions from the right channels to feed your funnel with qualified traffic. More impressions from the wrong audience just inflates your cost per lead.

Track impressions by channel so you can see where your visibility comes from. This helps you understand your channel mix and identify where to invest more or pull back.

Introduction

Impressions are the starting point of every growth system. Before someone can click, convert, or buy, they need to see you first. This metric tells you how visible your brand is across all your marketing and sales channels.

Most teams track impressions for paid ads but forget about the other channels. Your total impressions include organic social posts, email sends, cold outreach messages, and even phone calls. Each of these is a moment where someone could notice you.

Why it matters

Impressions determine the size of your funnel's entrance. If you want more leads, you either need more impressions or better conversion rates downstream. Usually, you need both.

Tracking impressions by channel shows you where your visibility comes from. You might discover that 80% of your impressions come from LinkedIn ads while organic search contributes almost nothing. That insight shapes where you invest.

Impressions also help you calculate efficiency. When you know your impressions and your clicks, you can calculate click rate. When click rate drops, you know your creative or targeting needs work.

How to apply it

Start by listing all your active channels. For each channel, find where impressions are reported:

  • Paid ads: Check your ad platform dashboards
  • Organic social: Check native analytics on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
  • Email: Count total emails sent (not opened, sent)
  • Outbound calls: Count total dials
  • Organic search: Use Google Search Console for total impressions

Add these together for your total weekly impressions. Track this number over time in your growth dashboard.

Set a baseline, then work on increasing impressions by 10% through scaling your best-performing channels.

Example 1: Paid advertising

A B2B software company runs LinkedIn ads targeting marketing managers. Their campaign shows 50,000 impressions per week. They want to scale to 100,000 impressions without increasing cost per click, so they expand their audience to include adjacent job titles.

Example 2: Email outreach

A consultancy sends 200 cold emails per week. Each email counts as one impression. To increase impressions, they add a second email in the sequence and hire an SDR to increase volume to 500 emails per week.

Example 3: Organic content

A founder posts three times per week on LinkedIn. Average impressions per post: 2,000. Total weekly impressions: 6,000. To increase this, they test posting five times per week and engage more in comments to boost algorithmic reach.

Keep learning

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Demand generation tools

Demand generation tools

Pipeline doesn't fill itself. These tools help you identify who to target, reach them at scale, and create content that earns attention in crowded markets.

Stages of awareness

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Channel selection

Channel selection

Spreading budget across every channel guarantees mediocrity. Focus on the channels where your buyers actually spend attention and scale what works before expanding.

Ad creative testing

Ad creative testing

Most teams waste ad spend testing randomly. A structured approach to creative testing compounds your learnings so every campaign performs better than the last.

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