Anyone who has done any online marketing is familiar with the term impressions. It’s probably the most inflated metric used to measure the success of an ad campaign, tracking how many eyeballs your ad likely reached. Saying an ad got 50,000 impressions sounds a lot more impressive than saying that same ad got 50 clicks, but at the end of the day that’s just smoke and mirrors designed to make you feel better about the money you’ve invested.   The truth about impressions is that it’s an antiquated metric that in today’s world is very easy to fake. For instance, are you aware that there are actually robots programmed to visit websites within an advertising network to drive up the impression count? When you think about how this helps the advertising network it makes sense.   I could acquire a hundred or so inexpensive, underutilized websites and sell ad space on them. I wouldn’t divulge which websites these were because they would be insignificant and of little value to anyone. I would just impress you by saying I can display your ad on a hundred different websites in my advertising network and get you 50,000 impressions a month. And 49,999 of those might be robots that I’ve cheaply acquired to visit these sites at random points throughout each day, making it seem like these websites actually get traffic. And technically they would—just not from actual humans.   So what, then, are we paying for if we’re only concerned about impressions? Possibly nothing. We might as well donate our advertising dollars to these companies who promise to report impressions as their main metric of success. We need to stop marketing this way.   Instead, we should be tracking as closely as we can how an advertising campaign affects our sales. It’s not always possible for a homebuilder to connect a sale to the advertising channel that referred it, because for a builder every sale is going to be closing offline even if it began online. But at the very least, you should be able to understand how many clicks you received from an ad and if those clicks ended up being the audience who’s likely to buy your homes, or a poorly targeted group of people, or just more sophisticated robots (by the way, you can buy robots and people that click on ads to inflate this metric too, just to show how this is evolving). If you’re not able to track the number and the value of a click, that should be a huge red flag telling you not to spend your money on that ad campaign.   Need help evaluating traffic from ad clicks? Check out our post on what to look for in Google Analytics or have an expert from the BuilderIQ team evaluate your advertising traffic for you.