While there are similarities between Impressions and Visual Views, Builder employs distinct methods to track and measure them, resulting in key differences.
Impressions represent views of specific content pieces on your site. Builder tracks impressions as part of its analytics and heat mapping features for Growth and Enterprise plans.
Each Builder content entry is associated with JavaScript code that records when the content is loaded onto your page. This code captures anonymous visitor information, including user distinctions, which is then utilized in the Insights dashboards.
For more detail, read Understanding Impressions.
Visual Views track the overall usage of your site or app containing visual content created in Builder. Visual Views are counted by rendering a tiny hidden tracking pixel, and each page with Builder content entries is assessed for accurate counting.
For more information, read Understanding Pageviews.
Because you could have multiple content entries on one Page of your site, it’s possible that a single Page could fire multiple Impressions, but it should only fire one Visual View.
Refer to the table below for more context on the differences:
| Visual Views | Impressions | |
|---|---|---|
Content level | Page-level event | Content entry-level |
Tracking method | Tracking pixel | Content entry JavaScript |
Data model content | Doesn't count toward Visual Views | Does count toward Impressions |
Data captured | Limited to display of tracking pixel | Anonymous info about visitor and content collected for reporting purposes |
Crawler impact | Bots generally have no effect except with full headless browser crawling. | Bots generally have no effect except with full headless browser crawling. |
Compared with GA* | Similar results | Counts may differ due to differences in tracking mechanisms |
*GA stands for Google Analytics.
Bots generally look at HTML only, not images or scripts, so they don't affect Visual Views or impressions. Only full headless browser crawling will count images (and Visual Views) or cause JavaScript impression code to run.
If you detect a crawler is accessing your site, you can choose to not render any content from Builder to remove any cost impact.
Read Understanding Impressions and Understanding Visual Views if you haven't already.
