An impression is counted each time your ad is served on a page a shopper loads. It does not mean the shopper saw the ad, only that Amazon delivered it. Impressions are free in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, which charge per click; Sponsored Display and DSP can charge per thousand viewable impressions instead.
Why it matters
Impressions are the ceiling on everything below them. No impressions means no clicks, no sales and no data, so a sudden drop in impressions is the first thing to look for when paid sales fall. The usual causes are mechanical: a campaign out of budget, a bid that fell below the auction floor, a listing that lost the Buy Box or went out of stock, a keyword that stopped indexing, or an ad rejected in moderation.
Impressions also give context to other numbers. A 0.2% click-through rate on 500 impressions is noise; the same rate on 200,000 impressions is a real problem with the tile. And a keyword with thousands of impressions and no clicks in an automatic campaign is usually matched to something your product is not.
What moves it
- Bid relative to competitors, which decides how often you win the auction.
- Daily budget, which caps how many auctions you can enter before the campaign pauses for the day.
- Relevance and indexing, since Amazon only enters your ad in auctions for queries your listing is relevant to.
- Eligibility. Out of stock, suppressed or without the featured offer, and the ad does not serve.
- Match type, with broad and automatic generating far more impressions than exact.
- Search volume, which rises and falls with season and events.
How we use it
Impressions are the first check in our traffic playbook, read by campaign and by keyword against the previous four weeks. We separate a fall caused by budget or bids, which is fixed in the console within a day, from a fall caused by eligibility or indexing, which is fixed on the listing. We also watch impression share on the handful of keywords that matter most to each product, because losing share there usually precedes losing rank.