What is the Difference Between Impressions and Pageviews?

These two terms may seem almost the same at first sight. However, if you are using OptiMonk, they mean different things.

You can meet the term Impressions when you view the Campaign Statistics in your OptiMonk account. It refers to the number of times your messages have been displayed to your visitors.

A pageview is when a user visits one of the pages on your website. Pageviews are tallied for each page of your site. When a page is being loaded (or reloaded) on your website, it is counted as a pageview. 

Let's see a practical example. You have a visitor coming to your page. They will see the popup message once, so they will generate one impression for the campaign. But they do not stop at the home page, they continue browsing in the Categories page and 3-4 of the product pages as well. This way, they generate 5-6 pageviews. 

Usually, the number of pageviews is higher than the number of impressions, because the campaigns often are not shown to every visitor. The OptiMonk app does not only detect when a popup is displayed but is also detects if it is not being displayed to the visitors. The pageviews will be counted even if the popup only displayed once to a specific customer. We have many different rules to choose from and the OptiMonk app needs to determine not only when to show the popup but also when not to show it.

Counting unique visitors: 

OptiMonk: A unique visitor if the last visit stored in the cookie is from the previous month or the cookie is empty (completely new visitor).

We look at unique visitors on a monthly basis with the first day of the month, only the counter is due to be reset on the day of the billing cycle.

E.g.: The 17th of the month of subscription.

The visitor visits the page on May 2, but the last visit stored in the cookie is April 25, so OptiMonk counts it as a new visitor.

In this case, OptiMonk will be added to a unique visitor number, which will not start again until May 17.

Google Analytics: It records visitors in 30-day intervals.

E.g.: If 30 days do not pass between 2 visits, it is not considered a new visitor.

For this reason, there may be differences between the OptiMonk report and the Google Analytics report, especially at the beginning of the month.

Other factors that can affect the values between reports:

• ad block can also be responsible for up to 20% of the traffic
• automatic bots that do not trigger Google Analytics, but do trigger OptiMonk
• OptiMonk will only count visitors if we have an active Campaign on the given domain.

Our plans' limit is a monthly limit in Pageviews. This limit resets on the first day of each calendar month. You can see the different pageview limits for the available OptiMonk subscriptions at https://www.optimonk.com/plans-and-pricing: