For businesses · 6 min read · Updated October 2026

What 'Estimated Impressions' Mean — and What They Don't

Lunar's impressions number is approved miles times a per-mile rate, scaled honestly for a door circle and weighted by zone. It's an estimate of reach — here's how to read it.

The impressions number on your Lunar dashboard is an estimate of how many times people saw your sticker — calculated, not counted. There is no camera on the car and no pixel that fires when a pedestrian glances at a door; what exists is a model: approved miles, times an impressions-per-mile rate, scaled down for a door circle's visibility, weighted by where the driving happened. That is exactly how the rest of out-of-home advertising has priced itself for decades — billboards, transit ads and bus wraps all sell on estimated views — and we think you deserve to know precisely what the number is made of, what it's good for, and where its honest limits are. This article is the full answer.

How the number is built

• Approved miles: the foundation. Drivers submit weekly odometer photos, and only verified, approved mileage enters the math — a mile nobody drove generates zero of anything, so the model starts from evidence, not promises.
• Impressions per mile: a rate for how many people plausibly see a moving vehicle over a mile, drawn from the same family of research the out-of-home industry uses to price billboards and transit.
• The visibility factor: a door circle is not a full wrap, so we scale the estimate down rather than borrow full-wrap numbers. This is the adjustment a less honest version of this product would quietly skip.
• The zone multiplier: a mile through a dense commercial strip passes more eyes than a mile on an empty road, so denser zones weigh more.

What the estimate IS good for

Three real uses. First, comparison over time: the model stays constant month to month, so a rising or falling number tells you something true about how much verified driving your campaign got and where it happened. Second, comparison against alternatives: billboards and transit quote the same currency, so you can put your Lunar campaign's cost next to a billboard quote and compare estimated reach per dollar on roughly equal terms — with the difference that Lunar's estimate is built on verified miles for your specific cars, not a traffic average for a road. Third, sanity-checking the buy itself: the number moves with real activity, because it's anchored in odometer photos and install verification rather than in a rate card.

What the estimate is NOT

• Not a count of people who noticed you. Passing traffic includes people looking at their phones. Every OOH medium shares this limit; we just say it out loud.
• Not unique reach. The same neighbour may pass your sticker forty times a month — which is repetition doing exactly what local advertising wants, but it means impressions aren't forty different households.
• Not clicks or conversions. An impression is an exposure, not an action. If a report ever promises 'guaranteed views' from a car sticker, be suspicious — that's not a thing anyone can measure honestly.
• Not comparable to digital 'impressions'. A served banner ad counts as an impression even when it renders below the fold for half a second. The two numbers share a word, not a meaning.

Why we insist on the word 'estimated'

Because the alternative is pretending. The out-of-home industry's own standard is modelled exposure — nobody interviews everyone who drove past a billboard — and the honest version of that standard is to show the label, keep the model conservative, and let the buyer judge. Lunar's voice rule is that impressions are estimates, never hype; it's why the visibility factor scales a door circle down instead of up, and why the dashboard pairs the estimate with the hard inputs behind it: your active cars and their approved mileage. You can always see the evidence under the math.

If you want harder numbers: add attribution

Reach and attribution are different jobs. The estimate tells you how much exposure your budget bought; if you want to know which orders it produced, layer attribution on top: an offer code of your own on the sticker ('DOOR10 for 10% off'), a QR code that lands on a tracking URL, or the oldest instrument in local business — asking new customers how they heard about you. Codes undercount (plenty of people see the sticker, remember the name, and walk in without scanning anything), so treat redemptions as a floor on the campaign's effect, not the ceiling. The pairing — modelled reach plus a code-based floor — is the most honest measurement stack a local advertiser can run.

Reading your dashboard like an operator

• Watch approved miles first: it's the input everything else follows. A dip usually means a driver's verification cycle, not a dying campaign.
• Expect month-to-month wobble: weather, holidays and a driver's schedule move real driving around. Judge trends on a phase, not a week.
• Weigh zones over raw volume: a modest number in your own delivery radius can be worth more than a big one spread thin — which is why zone matching is the setting that matters most at signup.
• Compare per dollar: at Half Moon's $500/month for 2 cars or Full Moon's $1,500 for 7, divide estimated impressions by spend when you compare against any other local channel.

The bottom line

Estimated impressions are a conservative, evidence-anchored model of reach — verified miles in, honest scaling applied, estimate labelled as one. They'll tell you whether your campaign is working as bought and how it stacks against other reach media; they won't tell you who fell in love with your shop, and we won't pretend otherwise. That's the trade Lunar offers: numbers you can trust precisely because they refuse to flatter you.