{
  "slug": "paid-impressions",
  "name": "Paid impressions",
  "aliases": [
    "Ad impressions"
  ],
  "definition": "The number of times your search ads were shown over the period.",
  "category": "Paid search",
  "type": "raw measure",
  "unit": "impressions",
  "direction": "higher-better",
  "verification": "verified",
  "calculation": "A sum of the Ads impressions column over the rows in scope, with nulls read as zero.",
  "aggregation": "Sums across rows.",
  "grain": "One number per date range, or one row per group_by value.",
  "dimensions": [
    "keyword",
    "campaign_keyword",
    "page",
    "adgroup_name",
    "campaign_name",
    "campaign_type",
    "intent",
    "category",
    "country",
    "device"
  ],
  "requiredFilters": [
    "date_range"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "google-ads"
  ],
  "reports": [
    "paid-search-performance-report"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "paid-efficiency-review"
  ],
  "verbs": [
    "paid_search_overview"
  ],
  "rungs": [
    "R2"
  ],
  "levers": [
    "L8"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "How many times did our ads show?",
    "Did impressions fall or did we lose share?"
  ],
  "interpretation": "The volume side of paid exposure. Read it beside search impression share: impressions can fall because the market shrank or because you won less of it, and only the share number separates the two.",
  "caveats": [
    "Impressions and impression share answer different questions, a rise in one with a fall in the other means the auction grew faster than you did.",
    "Whole-domain only; a segment argument is ignored.",
    "Paid impressions and Search Console organic impressions are different surfaces and are never summed."
  ],
  "freshness": "~1 day behind, Ads reporting settles overnight; same-day spend is provisional.",
  "failureModes": [
    "Reading an impression drop as a coverage problem without checking impression share."
  ],
  "notSameAs": [
    {
      "slug": "search-impression-share",
      "why": "Impressions count what you got; impression share expresses that as a fraction of what was available in the auction. Neither can be derived from the other here."
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    "paid-clicks",
    "paid-ctr",
    "search-impression-share"
  ],
  "workflows": [],
  "lastVerified": "2026-08-04"
}