How Impression Campaigns Work
The bulk of the JCN products are sold with a system called impressions.
An impressions basically means your ad loading somewhere on a website. So, if you buy 100,000 impressions, it means you’ve bought the rights for your ad to load 100,000 times.
Impressions campaigns are priced based on a CPM rate, which means Cost Per Thousand impressions (M is the roman numeral for 1,000). So if an ad type costs $1 CPM, this means that you’re getting 1,000 loads of your ad for every dollar you spend.
It’s worth noting, that it takes many loads of an ad for it to get clicked on. There will be lots of other ads on the page at the same time as yours, and your ad might load on a part of the page that a user doesn’t end up seeing. This is why these ad displays are measured in thousands – you need to have your ad served many times to get any results at all.
It’s also worth noting that the entire system is automated and randomized. Using advanced technology, our ad server calculates the total number of available ad space, as well as the total number of advertisers, and constantly distributes ads throughout the sites at random.
This means that every time you refresh the page, you’ll see your ad in different places. It also means that sometimes you won’t see your ad at all. This is because you have a finite number of impressions for your ads, and the website you’re on is serving many more people than that every month.
So for the sake of distributing your impressions as evenly as possible, and to account for the many advertisers who also want their ad to be seen, it’s quite possible that you might visit a page and not see your ad.
The good news is, because we’re using impressions, if you don’t see your ad, you also weren’t charged for it. The system only counts an impression if your ad actually loads.
Pricing based off impressions is certainly more complicated than just a flat price per month. It would be great if we could just say “pay $1,000 and you’ll be up on the top right corner for a month”.
The issue with a flat rate pricing structure, is it doesn’t account for a website’s monthly traffic. Your entire purpose in placing ads is to get seen by a site’s visitors. But what if a site gets a ton of visitors in a month? You’re just getting way more views for less money. What if they have a slow month and less people visit the site? You just overpaid.
Furthermore, large websites with millions of visitors per month would be delivering so much value to a single banner ad that it would be cost-prohibitive for most advertisers to even place an ad. Getting millions of eyeballs on ad would make an ad extremely valuable, but most people wouldn’t be able to pay for it.
Selling ads based off impression solves both issues – it makes sure you get exactly what you pay for, and allows high traffic sites to unbundle their ad zones and sell smaller segments of their overall traffic to more advertisers.
In a nutshell, impressions democratize the advertising experience for all parties – serving the interests of both the website and the many advertisers who want to place ads on the site.
An impressions basically means your ad loading somewhere on a website. So, if you buy 100,000 impressions, it means you’ve bought the rights for your ad to load 100,000 times.
Impressions campaigns are priced based on a CPM rate, which means Cost Per Thousand impressions (M is the roman numeral for 1,000). So if an ad type costs $1 CPM, this means that you’re getting 1,000 loads of your ad for every dollar you spend.
It’s worth noting, that it takes many loads of an ad for it to get clicked on. There will be lots of other ads on the page at the same time as yours, and your ad might load on a part of the page that a user doesn’t end up seeing. This is why these ad displays are measured in thousands – you need to have your ad served many times to get any results at all.
I can’t see my ad!
It’s also worth noting that the entire system is automated and randomized. Using advanced technology, our ad server calculates the total number of available ad space, as well as the total number of advertisers, and constantly distributes ads throughout the sites at random.
This means that every time you refresh the page, you’ll see your ad in different places. It also means that sometimes you won’t see your ad at all. This is because you have a finite number of impressions for your ads, and the website you’re on is serving many more people than that every month.
So for the sake of distributing your impressions as evenly as possible, and to account for the many advertisers who also want their ad to be seen, it’s quite possible that you might visit a page and not see your ad.
The good news is, because we’re using impressions, if you don’t see your ad, you also weren’t charged for it. The system only counts an impression if your ad actually loads.
Why complicate things with impressions?
Pricing based off impressions is certainly more complicated than just a flat price per month. It would be great if we could just say “pay $1,000 and you’ll be up on the top right corner for a month”.
The issue with a flat rate pricing structure, is it doesn’t account for a website’s monthly traffic. Your entire purpose in placing ads is to get seen by a site’s visitors. But what if a site gets a ton of visitors in a month? You’re just getting way more views for less money. What if they have a slow month and less people visit the site? You just overpaid.
Furthermore, large websites with millions of visitors per month would be delivering so much value to a single banner ad that it would be cost-prohibitive for most advertisers to even place an ad. Getting millions of eyeballs on ad would make an ad extremely valuable, but most people wouldn’t be able to pay for it.
Selling ads based off impression solves both issues – it makes sure you get exactly what you pay for, and allows high traffic sites to unbundle their ad zones and sell smaller segments of their overall traffic to more advertisers.
In a nutshell, impressions democratize the advertising experience for all parties – serving the interests of both the website and the many advertisers who want to place ads on the site.
Updated on: 08/21/2019
Thank you!