What’s Your First-Time Impression Ratio & What Can You Do About It?

By Bradley Riley
In:
SMMA
May 3, 2022

First-Time Impression Ration (or FTIR for short) is a metric that lets you know the percentage of your daily impressions that comes from people seeing your ad set for the first time.

This metric can be really helpful in situations when you aren’t quite sure why ad performance is dropping.

Typically, in an account where FTIR is a struggle, when you publish a new ad, you will start with a high FTIR that quickly drops below 60% and sometimes lower.

This is a clear indication that your ads are not reaching new people which means that your TOF could be in trouble.

A quick note: FTIR is not all that useful when considering Middle and Bottom of Funnel campaigns.

Certainly, if FTIR drops below 50% on the TOF (assuming you aren’t spending major $), you’re likely going to need to take some sort of action to remedy this.

Here are a few suggestions from the team:

“Think about your exclusions. Are you using enough? Do they need to be stricter? Without effective exclusions, your TOF may bleed into your lower-funnel which leaves you with some polluted data. Take a look at the ad set level and see if you can improve your exclusions from there.” - James

“It could be that your creative isn’t varied enough to reach new people. If you are using similar content with very similar messaging, the algorithm will likely push the new ads into the same ‘optimisation lane’ as previous ads, therefore reaching people who have seen your ads before. If CPA is poor, think about your ad format and angles. Consider mixing that up and testing something new.” - Cai

“On a similar note with creatives- if the account has used a specific format and message a lot previously, the algorithm may keep slipping into that optimisation lane. In this scenario, you may see a higher Cost Per Result by trying something new but it depends on the results you’re seeing now. If FTIR is low but CPA is great then that might be telling you that the format resonates with the audience and you just need more creative coming in more regularly to keep things fresh!” - Max

“If you have a great creative that has been leading the way for a long time, take the original, make some edits, maybe try a few new hooks, upload those and change the thumbnail.” - Georgia

Hope this helps!

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