Results

The ad campaign commenced on Monday (this is Friday) and it’s interesting to look at the stats. The publisher provides daily results in graph form of impressions, results, and cost per result.

As I understand it, impressions are where the ad was displayed on a web page someone accessed. It doesn’t measure whether the person actually saw it or their reaction. It’s like scrolling through X, formerly Twitter. If you scroll past a Tweet on your app, that’s an impression. It’s not able to tell if you read it or not. Impressions number in the thousands daily on this report I’m looking at, which is exciting but could also be misleading.

The important number is under results, which is the number of people who clicked on the ad. That number is a miniscule percentage of the number of impressions. And it doesn’t necessarily translate to an actual sale. It just means someone took a look at my Amazon page. That’s helpful in some regards since every page view shows interest, and Amazon uses their algorithms to determine how many copies of a book to keep in stock based on the accumulated interest. In other words, they’re trying to figure out the demand. Every hit on my book page counts. If that hit translates into an order, so much the better.

Cost per result in the graph translates the money paid for the ad campaign into a daily cost that’s then divided by the number of results. On some days that looks pretty good, while on others it’s kind of depressing. Such is the life of an ad campaign.