What are impressions?

Impressions count how many times your ads were served — each time an ad is rendered on a screen, the platform counts one, whether or not anyone looked at it. The figure comes straight from each ad platform's reporting; it is not measured independently.

Formula

impressions = Σ platform-reported impressions over the selected period

Worked example

A campaign delivers 400,000 impressions to 130,000 people in a month. The gap between the two numbers is frequency: each person saw an ad about three times on average. Impressions alone don't say whether that was three useful reminders or the same ignored banner three times — that is what CTR and the fatigue score exist to separate.

How Saldo Metrics computes it

fact_ad_performance stores one row per creative per day with the platform's reported impressions, alongside reach and frequency where the platform provides them. v_ad_spend_enriched attaches the channel, campaign and creative dimensions; v_channel_performance and v_campaign_performance sum impressions per channel and per campaign per day. The Marketing → Overview KPI (totalImpressions) adds the channel rows across the selected period; the campaign table (campaignImpressions) does the same per campaign. Nothing is deduplicated across platforms — a person who saw your ad on two channels is counted once by each.

Why it matters

Impressions are the reach side of every rate metric: CTR divides clicks by them, CPM divides spend by them. Trends matter more than levels — a sudden impression drop at constant budget usually means a delivery problem (rejected creative, exhausted audience, lost auction share), visible here before it shows up in revenue.

Common mistakes

• Reading impressions as people. Impressions count deliveries, not viewers. Use reach for unique people and frequency for repetition.
• Adding impressions across channels and calling it audience size. Each platform counts its own deliveries; the sum double-counts anyone present on two platforms.
• Buying impressions for their own sake. More impressions at flat clicks just dilutes CTR. The question is always what the impressions convert into.

Where you see this in the app

Marketing → Overview, as the Impressions KPI, in the channel summary and in the campaign table.