Pay per post or per impression, and when each fits

Last updated 20 September 2026.

Two ways to buy social marketing sit behind almost every quote you will be given. One charges for views delivered. The other charges for a piece of work made and approved. They price different things and carry risk in opposite directions, which is worth knowing before you compare two proposals that look similar.

Buying impressions

An impression buy is an advertising purchase. You set a budget, a platform serves your creative until the budget runs out, and you pay for the views delivered. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok ad buying all work this way.

What you are guaranteed is volume. If you pay for 200,000 impressions, the platform owes you 200,000 impressions. What you are not guaranteed is that anyone cared, and the creative is usually yours to produce before you start.

Buying a post

A per-post buy is a commission. You agree a fee for a specific deliverable, someone makes it, and you pay when it meets the brief.

What you are guaranteed here is the work. A real person made something about your product in their own words, on a real account with an audience that chose to follow it. How many people see it is open, since that depends on the creator's audience and on the platform's decisions that day.

Who carries the performance risk

This is the whole difference, and it is worth being blunt about it because Flixerpay sells the second model.

With impressions, the platform carries delivery risk. It has promised you a number and it has to hit it.

With a per-post buy, you carry the reach risk. A post can be exactly what you briefed, approved by you and paid for by you, and still reach fewer people than you hoped. None of that is a failure of the arrangement.

What you get in exchange is that you only pay for work you have seen and accepted. An impression buy spends whether or not the creative was any good.

What it changes for a creator

Payment per approved deliverable means a quiet post pays the same as one that travels. Your earnings track how many campaigns you claim and finish, so a slow week for the algorithm is not a slow week for you.

It cuts the other way as well. A post that does unusually well earns the agreed bounty and no more. That is the trade for being paid when one does poorly.

Which one fits the job

Impressions fit a known message you want in front of a large number of people, where you already have creative and a reason to believe it works. Scale is the point and the cost per view is the thing you are optimising.

Per-post fits the stage before that. You are still finding out whether anyone can explain your product in a way that lands, and you want that content made by people who use it.

A campaign on Flixerpay states its bounty before anyone claims it, starting at ₦5,000 for an approved post. A first test costs what you decide it costs. Plenty of brands end up running both, using per-post work to find what people respond to and impression buys to put the winner in front of more of them.

The mechanics of approval and payment are on how Flixerpay works, and the comparison with an agency covers the other decision brands weigh at the same time.