Your Journey Analytics Dashboard offers many tools and insights to help you increase your earnings, and when applied in the right ways, you can also increase your traffic. The Top Pages report in your Journey Analytics Dashboard is one of the most powerful tools we offer you, and can really be a game-changer for your business.
You can use page-level data to improve your performance, but in this article we are specifically looking at impressions per page, what they are, and how to use them.
Impressions Per Page
Note that this is NOT the number of ad units or ad slots on a page, but the number of impressions. That includes:
- in-content ads
- sidebar ads
- adhesion units
- Universal Player impressions
- recipe or DIY card impressions
- any ad spaces that refresh
Basically, this number is accounting for all the ads a reader experiences on the page.
The Difference Between Ad Slots and Impressions
If you add ?test=placeholders to the end of any URL on your site, you’ll be able to see all of the ad slots on that page.
Because of the way our advanced ad technology works, we really only serve ads where your readers are, and ad slots load impressions depending on how readers interact with the page.
EXAMPLE: If I use your Table of Contents to navigate ⅔ of the way down the page, we aren’t going to fill all of the ad slots I skipped over. Instead we are going to focus on the ad slots where your reader is lingering. This is a better user experience because it makes your page faster, but it also means that advertisers spend more, yielding higher CPMs.
High Impressions Per Page
If Impressions per Page seem high, that’s actually a good thing. A VERY good thing.
A high number of impressions per page usually indicate great reader engagement and correlate to metrics like higher time on page.
With Top Pages sorted high to low by pageview, establish the median impressions per page. Every site is different, so you’re looking for what that middle ground is for you. Once you’ve established the median, you can take a look at which pages are high and which are low comparatively.
The data in this table defaults to being sorted by views, highest to lowest, that lets you start by evaluating the posts that are seeing the bulk of your traffic.
High numbers of impressions served to readers mean that you probably have really well-optimized content, and because this number includes refreshes, high numbers can also indicate that readers are spending more time on your site.
Low Numbers
You can highlight and sort each metric in this table to adjust the sort from highest to lowest or lowest to highest. Remember that we are pulling in your top 20 posts, so if you sort using a metric other than 'Views' you will want to also be sure you are spending time working on content that is actually seeing traffic, so have an eye on the Views column as you work.
Skip over things like your homepage (the home page has a different goal), as well as things like print pages that don't really need optimizing, and focus on your actual content.
Questions to Ask
- Do you have a popular post that is serving a low number of impressions?
- Is it well-optimized?
- If it is, why are the impressions low? (Take a minute to view the post in an incognito window on mobile and experience it like your readers)
- Is anything blocking content or are features and functions encouraging readers to skip over parts of the content to land in a place that you are NOT serving ads?
- Do you have an aggressive opt-in that is encouraging readers to click away?
- Are you giving them an action item that causes them to pause early in the content?
- Is your most valuable content at the top of the post? If so, how are you encouraging readers to engage with the content beyond a quick answer?