• Blog
  • Feb 20, 2017
  • By Jeff Keenan
Need Impression Attribution? It’s Here.

LeadsRx is excited to release some great news!  The LeadsRx platform now supports impression tracking for most ad serving platforms.  With this latest news, this solidifies LeadsRx as the most comprehensive attribution platform supporting SMBs all the way to global enterprises.  We now track impressions for display ads, TV/radio ads, Point of Sale and just about any other online or offline channel that would be important to a business’s attribution model.

How did impression tracking get its start

In the online advertising industry, a viewable impression is a metric of ads which were actually viewable when served (in part, entirely or based on other conditional parameters). With the development of the first ad servers in 1995–1996 the assumption was that a requested ad was always available to the viewer of a requested web page. This allowed for the utilization of the server log file for collection of metadata to deliver a metric called the online impression that in traditional media meant an impression on a viewer.

This type of advertising metric was meant to resemble television and print advertising methods for speculating the cost of an advertisement, with the promise of even more accuracy due to the interactive nature of the Internet eliminating the need for industry-accepted approximates such as Nielsen ratings for television and circulation figures for print publications.

The value of an ad traditionally was based upon an estimate of how many different people saw or heard the ad.

How are impressions tracked?

  • We now have special “impression pixels” that can be issued for any digital touchpoint. Simply edit your touchpoint definition, then, select the box indicating you also want to track impressions.
  • On the list of touchpoints, you’ll see a new link, “View impression pixels”, next to touchpoints that have impression tracking enabled. Select this link to view your pixels.
  • There are two types of impression pixels:  Simple and Simple+.  We prefer you use Simple+ whenever possible as this will provide more tracking data. But if you ad server won’t accept these pixels, chose the Simple ones instead. There are two pixel each… one for secure connections, and the other for non-secure.
  • When an ad is being served, the LeadsRx impression pixel will be presented at the same time. This pixel notifies the LeadsRx tracking database which delivers a cookie back to the visitor.  Later, if this same visitor triggers a conversion, that cookie will be used to attribute their conversion back to the impression.

In closing, this is a new era for LeadsRx as we’re always innovating to bring a better product to marketers at all sizes of companies. If you’re interested in learning more, schedule your marketing attribution demo today.