Every advertiser wants something different out of an ad campaign – Reach, Performance, Branding, Awareness, Return on investment.
The list of goals goes on and on too – primary KPIs, secondary KPIs, ROI estimates, CPA goals, iGRPs…
At the very least though, as a gateway to all these KPIs and goals, advertisers want their ad to be seen. They want to know that for the money they’ve invested has gone into media that delivered their message to a relevant audience- a relevant audience that saw the ad.
A large portion of online ads are never seen according to integral ad science. Whether it’s because of their placement at the bottom of a page where few users ever scroll or because they’re planted in some hidden iframe, there’s a lot of ad impressions that are worth absolutely nothing.
These ad impressions are bundled up by publishers along with “good” visible impressions and when an advertiser buys x number of impressions, there’s always been an implicit connotation that some of these impressions will not be seen.
In the best of cases, most of the bought impressions are visible. In the worst of cases a lot aren’t. But life went on.
Enter viewability. The IAB (Interactive advertising Bureau) study for viewability was done in 2012 to address how many ads are viewable. Below is an extract from the pdf of the study about viewability that the IAB performed.
Data from 22 live production campaigns, involving more
than 3 billion served impressions, revealed the following:
- Viewable rates for the pilot campaigns ranged from a high of 78.6% to a low of 7.3%
- Unmeasured rates were a significant concern:
- Cross-Domain I-Frames
- Other Unmeasured Conditions
As a result of this study, the IAB decided to define viewable ads for Display as an ad that is:
- 50% of pixels in the viewable space of the browser
- Minimum of one consecutive second
Back in 2012, this was a nice idea, one to think about for the future.
But then, on a fateful day in April 2013, along came the future when Google made paying for viewable impressions a standard in Adwords.
Pay for ads that users are seeing (according to the IAB definition of seeing something). For Google that’s relatively easy to put in place – will hardly would put a dent in their profit since their Adsense program pays a publishers for ads that are clicked and sells to advertisers on a CPM basis (that can also be presented as a CPC, CPA, truview in youtube, but the bottom line is CPM)
For other publishers, this poses a challenge. Almost every other publisher in the world doesn’t have Google’s immense inventory. Paying for viewable ads would put a dent in their profits – a potentially painful dent if their inventory is mostly not viewable.
However, this is also an opportunity for publishers that have an inventory of good quality to finally be vindicated. Although it is implied and “baked into” the CPMs nowadays that some impressions will not be seen, the knowledge of how many impressions are not seen is undoubtedly valuable.
This year will be interesting. It seems that viewability has come of age although there is a lack of standards. Although the tech is far from perfect, it will certainly be interesting to see which publishers evangelize it and which publishers have something to hide.
At the end of the day though, advertisers will have to ask the question they’ve always asked:”Has my ad been seen?” Because this time there might be a definite answer.