Are Your Online Ads Being Seen? The Results from Our 1.2 Million Impression Test May Shock You!

One of the key topics at the OMMA Display Conference that we attended in July was “viewability“, the term that refers to whether online ads are seen or at least have the opportunity to be seen by a person.

Perhaps you are wondering why this is even an issue and assumed the ads you are buying for your exhibitions and events are being seen.

Well, they may not be!  There is a big difference between an ad being “served” and actually being “seen”.  There are a variety of reasons for this.  For example, an ad is delivered to a below-the-fold position but the web site visitor never scrolls down to that area of the page.  Though this ad was never “in-view”, it would still be considered served, and yes, you would still pay for it if you are buying on a CPM basis.

According to PointRoll’s 2013 Benchmark Report, which looked at over 100 billion online ad impressions from multiple ad exchanges, only about 60% of online ads were viewable.  We have seen other large-scale studies which put viewability at south of 50%.

To bring this point closer to home for event marketers, we share with you results from a viewability test campaign Encore Media Partners recently ran for one of its exhibition clients in order to optimize their ad spend.

The test was run in a major U.S. market and involved over 1.2 million online impressions across four standard IAB units: 300 x 250, 160 x 600, 728 x 90 and 300 x 600. The ad inventory was 100% exchange/network impressions sourced on a RTB / CPM basis.

The result: only 48.4% of impressions were viewable based on the IAB definition, which defines an impression as viewable if at least 50% of the ad is in-view for at least one second.

Poor viewability reduces campaign performance and wastes precious marketing dollars so understand the in-view rates of the ad inventory you are buying and optimize accordingly.

Posted on September 3, 2014