Impressions - what does that mean?

Please explain what "Impressions" means

[fhaws]

I frequently see the word "Impressions" or "10K Impressions this month" when talking about AdSense etc. What does that mean?

What does TOS mean?

What does AM stand for? I know AS stands for AdSense.

[edited by: fhaws at 3:29 pm (utc) on July 29, 2004]

[mcavill]

page views - each time the AS JavaScript is called by a browser is one impression (i think :p)

[novice]

TOS - Terms of Service
AM - Affiliate Marketing
Impressions - Page Views

[luckychucky]

In the FAQ for my site statistics there are several metrics defined. My general impression is that a quotation of the number of 'hits' to a site can be misleading, or at best, is of limited usefulness. More important is some kind of guage/estimate of how many unique visitors a site receives. Anyway, maybe you can extract some useful info from the following FAQ text:

HITS represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).

FILES represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache.

Tip: By looking at the difference between hits and files, you can get a rough indication of repeat visitors, as the greater the difference between the two, the more people are requesting pages they already have cached (have viewed already).

SITES is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the server. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many ip addresses so it should be used simply as a rough guage as to the number of visitors to your server.

VISITS occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

PAGES are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested, and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips). Some people call this metric page views or page impressions, and defaults to any URL that has an extension of .htm, .html or .cgi.

[Rodney]

My general impression is that a quotation of the number of 'hits' to a site can be misleading

I don't think the original poster asked about HITS (unless they edited that part out of their post).

Welcome to WebmasterWorld fhaws :)

[luckychucky]

My general take on this is that 'hit' = 'impression' = 'visit' if no further details are given. The point being that someone trying to sell you text links or banner ads, or otherwise vaguely trying to impress those who are easily impressed, should be subjected to some pointed questions about how exactly he's measuring/deriving unverified data about the phenomenal traffic he claims his site receives--no matter whether he measures it in VISITS, HITS or IMPRESSIONS, none of which terms has any codified, standardized industry definition (as far as I'm aware) -- and could mean anything at all.