Post impression activities tell you how your audience is behaving after it has clicked on your ad. This is one of the most detailed and useful metrics to track when looking at your analytics and it can be a great help when it comes to improving your campaign.
Post impression conversions are, as the name would suggest, what happens after the advert has been displayed: after an impression.
In online advertising, an impression is the point at which the advert is loaded on the page. When you visit a website, it will load the ads after loading the other elements and this is what is called an impression. Often, the term impression is equated to mean that the viewer has seen the advert. 1,000 impressions then might essentially mean 1,000 views. In reality this isn’t quite true: rather, some of those ads might have been loaded off the page or might have been obscured by pop-ups etc.
A conversion meanwhile is an action. This is the action that you want the visitor to your site to take, and that might mean that they buy a product, it might mean that they subscribe to your mailing list, or it might mean something else entirely. When you manage to get a visitor to convert, you have achieved your objective.
Post click conversions mean that for every advert click, you have X number of conversions. So for instance, if you get 1,000 clicks on your ads, equating to 1,000 new visitors, and that in turn results in 2 clicks, then your post click conversion rate might be something along the lines of 1/500.
This can then be very useful for calculating costs and profits. In particular, it can be very useful for telling you how much ROI you are making from your ads. That’s because PPC ads are charged on a Pay Per Click basis. In other words, you pay only when someone clicks on your ads. If you know how many of those clicks will eventually result in sales, then you can ascertain how much click is worth. If every click costs 50 cents and you make $30 for every 100 visitors, then is that a profitable business model?
Likewise, post click behaviors tell you precisely which ad was clicked that led to a sale. This lets you see what the best performing ads are for you. After all, your end goal is not just to get people to your website. Your end goal is to get people to buy from you! If one ad is getting a lot of clicks but no one who clicks that ad is buying anything, then maybe the wording in that ad is misleading? Maybe you are unintentionally attracting the wrong kind of click? Now you know what the post-click behavior is for each ad, you know which one is truly doing the best work for you.
Post impression behavior is potentially even more powerful. This can tell you a bit about how your ads are helping to increase brand awareness (if someone visits your site later after viewing the ad) and it can give you even more detailed information regarding the cost-to-profit ratio. After all, you often end up paying for impressions as well as clicks, and even when you don’t, the cost per impression can be calculated by looking at your CTR and your CPC.
This is perhaps the most detailed and nuanced metric you can find for your marketing campaign though. The only problem and limitation, is that it is so difficult to draw out that information and to remove the confounding variables.
