Impressions
Impressions are the top of the Apple Ads funnel: how many times the App Store actually showed your ad. Every tap, download and subscriber starts as one of them.
Updated
In Adapty Ads Manager, impressions for search results campaigns are the number of times your sponsored ad appeared in App Store search results during the reporting period. An impression means you won the auction for a search and your ad was displayed. It does not mean the user tapped, read the ad closely or downloaded the app.
What counts as an impression
- One impression is one display of your ad for one search. If the same person searches twice and sees your ad both times, that is two impressions.
- You only get an impression when you win the auction. Your bid, your app’s relevance to the query and competing bids all decide whether your ad is shown at all.
- On search results campaigns with cost-per-tap pricing, impressions are free. You are charged when someone taps, not when the ad is shown.
Other Apple Ads placements, such as the Today tab, Search tab or product pages, report their own impressions. When you compare numbers, compare within one placement, because users behave very differently on each.
Metrics built on impressions
Impressions on their own say little about quality. They become useful as the denominator of other metrics.
| Metric | Formula | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| TTR | Taps / Impressions × 100% | How often people who see the ad tap it |
| Avg CPM | Spend / (Impressions / 1000) | The effective cost of a thousand impressions |
| DPM | Total Downloads / Impressions × 1000 | Downloads per thousand impressions |
| Impression share | Your impressions / all impressions for the search term | How much of the available visibility you captured |
On cost-per-tap campaigns, CPM is an effective figure: you did not pay per thousand impressions, but dividing spend by impressions shows what visibility cost you in practice.
Impressions and impression share
Raw impressions tell you how often you were shown. Impression share tells you how often you were shown out of all the times an ad appeared for that search term. A keyword with a few hundred impressions might be a low-volume query you already dominate, or a high-volume query where you appear rarely. Impression share and search popularity separate those two cases.
When a keyword gets too few impressions
- Check the bid. A maximum CPT below what competitors pay means you rarely win the auction.
- Check relevance. Apple will not show an ad it considers a poor match for the query, whatever the bid.
- Check match type and search popularity. An exact-match keyword with little search volume simply has few searches to show against.
- Check budget. A campaign that spends its daily budget early stops serving, which cuts impressions later in the day.
Related metrics
Impressions lead to taps through TTR, taps lead to downloads through download rate, and DPM combines both steps into a single view of how much each thousand impressions produced. From there, trials, subscriptions and revenue show what that visibility was worth.