Here's a little advertising math equation for you:
1 View > 1 Impression
That’s right. One view is greater than one impression when it comes to having a digital impact. In fact, according to Buzzfeed, “five billion views are worth more than 18 billion impressions”. What’s the difference? Let’s break it down.
Impressions are the number of times someone comes across your brand – maybe their ad is in your news feed or their logo made an appearance on the sidebar of a website you were browsing. Does that mean you actually paid attention to it? Clicked on it? Not necessarily. A view, on the other hand, is a metric of attention. It means someone intentionally wanted to view your branded content. In the world of video, Facebook and Instagram count a “view” after watching 3 seconds of a video compared to YouTube’s 30 seconds. Twitter counts a “view” when a video is 100% in-view on the user’s device and has been watched for at least 3 seconds, or if the user clicks to watch the video in full screen.
Here’s a great analogy. Walking past a retail store in the mall is considered an “impression”. You saw the store, but you didn’t go in or pay it any mind. Now, when you actually enter a store, this would be considered a “view”; you entered the store to view the brand and what it has to offer. So which store has a better chance of making a profit? At the end of the day, an infinite amount of impressions are worthless if they are not driving users to your store, site or brand.
How can a company increase their number of “views”? Buzzfeed asks it perfectly, “Why are we publishing so many links to social feeds when people click them less than 5% of the time?” Their solution was to start publishing more native content directly into social feeds, which decreased link pollution and increased distributed views.
So don’t just impress people – develop content that grabs attention and hold on to it.