Impressions

An impression is counted every time your ad, post, or search listing is shown to a person. It does not matter whether they clicked, read it, or even consciously noticed it — if it appeared on their screen, that is one impression.

For example, if a dentist in Augusta runs a search ad and it appears at the top of the results 2,000 times in a week, that is 2,000 impressions. Whether anyone clicked is a separate question answered by click-through rate.

Impressions are a top-of-funnel metric. They tell you how much visibility you are getting, which is the raw material everything else is built from — you cannot get clicks or leads from an ad no one sees.

Three terms get muddled constantly, so here is the plain version:

• Impressions — total times your content was displayed. One person seeing your ad five times counts as five impressions.
• Reach — the number of unique people who saw it. That same person counts once.
• Clicks — the times someone actually clicked through.

Impressions alone can be a vanity metric — big numbers that feel good but do not pay bills. They become useful when paired with what happened next. A high impression count with a low CTR often means your ad is showing but not resonating. In Google Ads, "impression share" also tells you what percentage of available impressions you are capturing, which is handy for spotting missed opportunity. The real story always lives in what your impressions convert into — see conversion rate.