Impressions count how many times your content was shown on a screen. The same person seeing your post three times counts as three impressions. It is the widest number in analytics: it counts every display, not every person.
These two get mixed up all the time, so here is the clean split. Reach counts PEOPLE. Impressions count DISPLAYS.
Example: 100 people see your post. 30 of them scroll past it twice. Your reach is 100. Your impressions are 130.
Impressions divided by reach gives you frequency: how often the average person saw the post. A frequency near 1 means the platform is showing you to new people. A high frequency means the same people keep seeing you again.
In your analytics, impressions sit next to reach so you can compare them. In advertising, impressions are the product itself: CPM pricing literally means cost per 1,000 impressions.
On X (Twitter), impressions went public. The small view counter under every post is an impression count that everyone can see. That changed the game: your impressions on X are now social proof, not just a private stat. That's the reason Twitter impressions exist as a product you can buy.
An impression fires when the post is displayed. It doesn't mean anyone read it, watched it, or cared.
A post that flew past at full scroll speed counts exactly the same as a post someone read twice. So high impressions with low engagement usually means one thing: the platform showed your content, and people skipped it. That's a content problem, not a distribution problem.
Watch impressions together with engagement, never alone.
Not exactly. An impression counts any display, even in a feed you scrolled past. A view usually needs the content to actually play or open, and every platform defines it a bit differently.
Because some people saw your content more than once. Impressions count every display, reach counts each person once. Higher impressions than reach is completely normal.
On X you can, because the view count under a post is public: Twitter impressions raise that visible number. On platforms where impressions stay private, there's nothing for anyone to see, so views and likes are bought instead.
Related terms
Every definition lives in the full glossary, and the services behind the vocabulary are on the services page.