Social Q&A: #5 Potential vs actual impressions

In this series, our Head of Account Management Jamie Watson addresses frequently asked questions about audience intelligence platform Pulsar. Whether you’re a frequent Pulsar user or still evaluating a social media research platform for purchase, Jamie’s tips, tricks and useful info aim to highlight what to look out for.

This week I'd like to provide a topline refresher of one of the more prominent metrics available on CORE and TRAC: impressions!

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times a post has been displayed in a timeline, whether the post is clicked or not. In other words, it's an estimate of how many times people have most likely seen or been exposed to a piece of content. They are a standard reporting metric used within digital marketing and insight teams, and one of the main reasons for this is that this metric is very easy to interpret. Plus, the numbers are also usually very large, which tends to please senior stakeholders.

That said, impressions are also one of the more debated metrics in the industry. That's because the number of potential impressions (the total amount of times that a piece of content could have been delivered based on the size of an audience) is always a much more inflated number than the volume of impressions actually delivered (based on the number of people who are online, on a specific channel, at any given time). So, given that the endgame is getting people to see your content, how useful is that potential impressions figure really?

To support both these angles, Pulsar uses two metrics, PEI and AEI:

Potential Estimated Impressions (PEI)

Potential estimated impressions is the potential amount of times your post has appeared in a timeline. Simply put, if I have 300 followers, my PEI for that post will be 300. If you also have 300 followers (I'm sure you have many more ;-)) and retweet me, then the post will have a PEI of 600. One more for fun: if Pulsar's co-founder Francesco D'Orazio (@abc3d - 2,968 followers) also retweets me, the post now has a PEI of 3,568.

Actual Estimated Impressions (AEI) 

Conversely to the PEI metric, the AEI uses channel specific benchmarks, and estimates to predict the actual number of times that a piece of content has been delivered to a timeline. For a channel like Twitter this figure tends to be around 11% of the PEI and is a much more desirable option if you are looking to compare or consolidate social data with other data sources such as search or sales as it gives you a much more realistic view of your audience's behaviour.

With AEI, there is one key point worth noting when using this metric and the dashboard:

All our speed dials use AEI rather than PEI:

Whether on CORE:

or TRAC:

We have chosen to use the AEI metric, as we wanted the most visible figure to be the most realistic figure. This being said, if you are looking for the PEI figure then you can access this through the data exports.

And there it is: most of what you could ever need to know about impressions. If you have any additional questions, please do give your Account Manager a shout for further detail or email [email protected].

New to Pulsar but curious to learn more? We’re here for you – drop us a line on [email protected]. And of course you’re always welcome to give us a call on +44 (0)20 7874 6577