There's a lot that publishers and app developers can do to increase the likelihood that their ads will be measured as viewable. Our latest infographic puts a spotlight on viewability by sharing a dozen technical best practices for improving viewability across four categories based on insights from Active View, Google's MRC-accredited viewable impression measurement technology. These insights and recommendations come from our services teams that have spent thousands of hours working with publishers and developers to improve advertising outcomes.
In this post, we focus on tips you can use to improve ad viewability by optimizing your apps and sites for speed and responsiveness.
Here is today's recommendation:
We hope these recommendations will improve your site or apps ad viewability. Feel free to share your viewability success story in the comments section below.
In the next part of our Spotlight on Viewability, we'll share 3 speedy ways to improve viewability.
Posted by Anish Kattukaran, Product Marketing Manager
Increasing the total number of viewable ad impressions has been shown to improve the performance of ads on sites and apps and increase advertiser satisfaction. To help publishers and app developers increase the likelihood that their ads will be measured as viewable, we're excited to share the viewability spotlight infographic. It contains a dozen technical best practices for improving viewability across four categories based on insights from Active View, Google's MRC-accredited viewable impression measurement technology.
The infographic covers how to:
Enable viewability measurement
Optimize for speed and responsiveness
Lay out ads for optimal viewability
Load ads and content for optimal viewability
Publishers and app developers across the globe have been able to seamlessly measure viewability, at no additional charge, with the launch of Google’s Active View technology in DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, AdSense and AdMob. The tips in the viewability spotlight infographic can help you go beyond simply understanding viewability rates to optimizing viewability on your site or app so that all of your impressions are viewable.
These insights and recommendations come from our services teams that have spent thousands of hours working with publishers and developers to improve advertising outcomes.
Increasing the total number of viewable ad impressions has been shown to improve the performance of ads on sites and apps and increase advertiser satisfaction. To help publishers and app developers increase the likelihood that their ads will be measured as viewable, we're excited to share the viewability spotlight infographic. It contains a dozen technical best practices for improving viewability across four categories based on insights from Active View, Google's MRC-accredited viewable impression measurement technology.
The infographic covers how to:
Enable viewability measurement
Optimize for speed and responsiveness
Lay out ads for optimal viewability
Load ads and content for optimal viewability
Publishers and app developers across the globe have been able to seamlessly measure viewability, at no additional charge, with the launch of Google’s Active View technology in DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, AdSense and AdMob. The tips in the viewability spotlight infographic can help you go beyond simply understanding viewability rates to optimizing viewability on your site or app so that all of your impressions are viewable.
These insights and recommendations come from our services teams that have spent thousands of hours working with publishers and developers to improve advertising outcomes.
We’ve been advancing measurement standards across the ad industry with Active View, Google’s ad viewability measurement solution, for some time. Introduced in 2012, we’ve been extending Active View reporting across our ad platforms, including DoubleClick, so publishers can get an accurate measure of ad viewability.
Now available in AdMob for the first time, Active View metrics in the AdMob Network report help you understand what portion of your AdMob ads are viewable long enough to potentially be actionable by users. With this data you can increase the viewability of your ads by optimizing how they appear in your app. At this time, the Active View metrics in the AdMob Network report are only for display ads, with metrics for video ads coming soon. What is ad viewability? Generally, viewability is the percentage of ads considered viewable by users out of the total number of ads measured. It’s important because it helps advertisers to understand what percentage of their ads are potentially actionable. Google’s Active View metric counts an ad as viewable if a minimum of 50% of the pixels of the ad are on screen for at least one continuous second for display ads, or two continuous seconds for video ads.
Think about this experience on your mobile app. If you place your ads near the bottom of a long screen where users are unlikely to scroll, then your total number of viewable impressions is likely to be lower than if you had placed the ad higher up the screen.
In the report, metrics include the percentage of measurable impressions (eligible impressions that could be measured with Active View), and the percentage of viewable impressions (the percentage of measurable Active View-eligible impressions that were viewable). You can find more details about additional metrics in this AdMob help center article.
View Active View metrics for your app in the AdMob Network report (top right)
What are the benefits for the ad industry and app developers? More insights into viewability provide benefits for the ad industry overall. Advertisers get an accurate picture of what percentage of their ads are being seen by users. Based on this knowledge they can create better ads which are more engaging to users, and also gain insight into which apps are providing the most value to them. For advertisers who are paying by the impression, this can result in more efficient ad campaigns.
Developers stand to benefit by being able to create well-integrated ad experiences in apps to improve user experience which can lead to higher monetization. For example, developers can use this data to place ads in positions where they are more viewable, while still keeping app content engaging and easy to access.
Explore and stay tuned We invite you to check out the new Active View metrics in your AdMob account, and come back to the Inside AdMob blog next week for the start of a new five-part series on ad viewability.
Until then, for more tips on app monetization, follow our Twitter and Google+ pages.
We've had a lot of questions recently from AdSense publishers about viewability and the new Active View metrics in AdSense accounts. Active View can really help you improve your AdSense earnings, so let's take a closer look. What are Active View and viewability?
Active View is Google’s ad viewability measurement solution. It tracks the viewability of ads served by AdSense: that is, the percentage of ads that are considered viewable out of the total number of ads measured. We use the online ad industry standard: a display ad is counted as viewable when at least 50% of the ad is within the viewable space on the user’s screen for one second or more.
So an ad that is (for instance) placed below the first screen on a given page won't be counted as viewable if the viewer never scrolls down. This is why viewability a good way of determining whether your AdSense ads are actually being seen by your website visitors or simply loading without a chance of catching the viewer's eye.
Why is viewability important?
The industry shift towards viewability is good for both publishers and advertisers for many reasons.
Benefits for advertisers and the advertising industry
Without viewability metrics, advertisers could be paying for ads that loaded on a page but were never seen. If you're an advertiser paying per click you might not care, but if you're paying by the impression it could be a much bigger deal.
Active View metrics help because they show advertisers what percentage of their ads are actually being seen by users and which publishers provide the highest level of viewability. This helps advertisers make smarter decisions about where they should buy ad impressions. That makes display ads both more measurable and more effective.
Benefits for publishers
Viewability metrics also help publishers understand the true performance of the AdSense ads they display. Whether the ad is being paid for by click or by impression, ads that aren't seen by the user can’t have an impact. In the long run, they won’t generate reliable ad revenue.
If publishers notice that the Active View percentage for certain ad units is lower than others, that ad position is probably underperforming and ought to be optimized. Active View can help publishers increase their AdSense earnings as they take corrective action and improve the performance of these ads.
How to improve your ad viewability
Once you become familiar with viewability statistics, there are two changes you can make to improve your results.
Change ad sizes
Vertical ad units such as 160x600 and 120x600 tend to have higher Active View percentages. This makes sense: vertical ad units are in view for longer as the user scrolls up or down the page. Other ad sizes with high viewability rates include the 120x240 and 240x400 ad units.
Change ad positions
Rethinking the position of your AdSense ad units can also help improve your viewability rates. It's not always just a matter of putting more ads at the top of the page: for example, ads positioned just above the fold tend to have higher viewability rates since they remain within view for longer as the user scrolls down. Experiment with what works best on your site.
Paying close attention to your Active View numbers will help you bring your visitors the targeted ads you want them to see and remove the uncertainty around unviewable ads. In the end, that should mean fewer underperforming ad units and a potentially a new way to achieve better revenues overall.
We think that in the long term viewability will change the way that advertisers allocate their budgets to online display. And if you're a publisher, it's a good idea to start paying attention to these new numbers and make adjustments to your ad sizes, ad units, and ad positions to improve viewability and potentially achieve better results.
With over half of ads measured not viewed, it’s more important than ever for advertisers to be able to act on viewability measurement. That’s why we’re happy to roll out new product updates we announced at CES, that make viewability more actionable for advertisers using the DoubleClick platform.
As we heard from Neal Mohan earlier this month, “when it comes to impact, having your ad seen is not just important, it’s fundamental.” It’s why we’re investing heavily to help make viewability a common currency across the industry. Over the last year, we’ve enabled advertisers to buy only viewable impressions across the Google Display Network, built Active View viewability reporting into our DoubleClick platforms for display and video, and today we’re building on this even further with two launches that will help advertisers act on these viewability metrics.
Viewability targeting in Doubleclick Bid Manager. Clients of DoubleClick Bid Manager can now measure and target impressions globally based on the historical viewability of an impression. By programmatically targeting viewable impressions, marketers are able to improve the performance of their campaigns, in real-time, eliminating the need to manually reallocate spend to find viewable impressions.
Viewability data in DoubleClick Ad Exchange bid requests. Ad Exchange clients can now see the historical viewability percentage for every impression when available. With this signal, programmatic buyers can make smarter decisions about the value of impressions before they place their bids on Ad Exchange.
Viewability reporting has given marketers the data to understand how many of their ads were seen. Now they can use that same data to programmatically increase the viewability of their campaigns. For brands like TalkTalk Telecom Group, using viewability targeting on DoubleClick Bid Manager has driven strong results.
TalkTalk generates 94% more viewable impressions TalkTalk Telecom Group, a leading TV, broadband, mobile, and phone provider in the U.K., was eager to boost the viewability of its ads while maintaining costs. Having already implemented programmatic buying to reach potential customers at the exact moment they're ready to commit, TalkTalk wanted to then ensure its ads were actually being seen by targeting viewable impressions. To do so, the company deployed DoubleClick Bid Manager with Active View. TalkTalk generated 94% more viewable impressions, increased CTR 133%, and lowered CPC by 40%.
"Being able to target by viewability with Active View is groundbreaking. Active View enables us to measure the viewability of our ads, and Bid Manager's viewability targeting feature provides us with a solution to increase the number of viewable impressions we buy." - Rich Bailey, online marketing manager, TalkTalk Telecom Group.
Today’s consumer spends more time in digital than any other media, often while fluidly moving across screens. In the past three years alone, multi-screen media consumption has jumped by 500 percent, with 90 percent of consumers moving between one device and another to complete a task, whether it’s to shop, plan a trip or browse content. And the growth rates are stunning: on YouTube, more video content will be uploaded today than all three major networks created in the past five years.
Today at CES I announced two really exciting developments that will help turbocharge the future of video advertising:
First, more than 30 mainstays of video advertising--broadcasters, premium publishers and major brands--have joined our premium video marketplace, Google Partner Select and;
We’re rolling out viewability reporting across our ad platforms. This will, for the first time, inform brands whether their video ads on digital channels were actually seen or not (as opposed to, for example, appearing off-screen, going unwatched or being swiped past).
Our goal with both of these updates is to help marketers succeed in today’s world of media abundance by connecting them with consumers at the right time in the right place and enabling them to measure what truly matters.
An update on Partner Select In June we introduced you to Google Partner Select, a premium video marketplace that brings together the best of brand advertising with the best of programmatic. Our goal was to create a marketplace of top-quality video content from the best producers. Today, we’re happy to share some of those partnerships.
Since launch, more than 30 broadcast and premium publisher brands have signed on including CBS Interactive, Fox News, Discovery, Animal Planet, TLC, HGTV, Food Network, Cooking Channel, Travel Channel, Hearst Television, Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, Men’s Fitness, and PGA Tour. These publishers are helping brands discover a wide range of their premium video content including full-episode shows, live sports & news, and short-form content across a broad range of audiences and content categories. And all of this inventory is exclusive to Google Partner Select.
We’ve also seen strong traction on the advertiser side with over 20 major brand advertisers, including iconic brands like Allstate, BMW and Netflix, and their agencies having signed significant commitments to buy through Google Partner Select. In our early tests, we've seen video ads running through Google Partner Select driving significant audience engagement with 74% video ad completion rates, demonstrating that when brands pick the right moments, engagement follows.
Viewability for Video When it comes to impact, being seen is not just important, it’s fundamental. That’s why this time last year, we set a goal for ourselves to help make viewability a common currency across the industry. I’m encouraged that this issue is staying top of mind for so many and hope that marketers and publishers continue to push for the full transparency and accountability they deserve.
In our latest of ongoing investments in this area, in the coming days, we will start to offer viewability reporting for video campaigns available to all marketers and publishers using our DoubleClick platforms, as well as for the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We’ll soon have this capability for reserved inventory on YouTube as well (including all of Google Preferred) across desktop and app views, a significant addition with so much viewership now happening in mobile. In the coming months, we’ll start offering the ability to target viewable impressions in DoubleClick, as well as the ability to buy only viewable video impressions across the Google Display Network. Later in the year, we also plan to report on audibility for video ads, as well as the total amount of time an ad was viewable.
We’re adhering to the industry definition for video viewability (as set by the MRC and Making Measurement Make Sense): 50% or more of the video being on screen for two seconds or longer.
Viewability, though, is just the starting point, not an end in and of itself. With the confidence that their ads can be seen by a real person, marketers can then go on to strive for--and measure--what really matters, impact and engagement. Along with our commitment to viewability, we’ll continue our investments in other ways to help marketers drive engagement, like our TrueView format (where advertisers only pay when consumers engage) and Brand Lift surveys, which help marketers measure the impact of their campaigns on their branding goals.
I’m incredibly excited about the future of digital video for brand building. No other medium brings together sight, sound and motion--and incredible measurability. This is the start of what we expect will be a year of leaps forward in the industry in making digital work for brand advertisers. So watch this space for more to come.
-- posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Video & Display Advertising
In an important step toward making brand measurement as actionable as the click, customers of our DoubleClick platform globally now have access to Active View reporting. Advertisers, agencies and publishers now have access to a common, integrated metric to evaluate and compare the viewability of impressions across the web.
Digital advertising can provide brand marketers better measurement for their campaigns, but to do so, we must transition to a market where viewable impressions are a standard currency. On March 31, the Media Rating Council took the first step toward making viewable impressions a standard by lifting its advisory to refrain from transacting on viewable impressions as a digital advertising currency. We’ve always been a strong supporter of the viewability standard and we’re excited to roll out our MRC-certified viewability solution Active View to our DoubleClick partners.
DoubleClick clients globally now have access to Active View viewability reporting by default in:
DoubleClick for Publishers, for publishers using Google Publisher Tags
DoubleClick Ad Exchange, in the new Query Tool
DoubleClick Digital Marketing
DoubleClick Campaign Manager, including reach and frequency
DoubleClick Bid Manager
From measurement to currency, the future of Viewability Moving from served impressions to viewable impressions as the standard unit of measurement in the advertising ecosystem will be a huge shift but, leaders in the industry see opportunity ahead.
“The shift toward viewability will bring more brand spend to digital, ultimately benefiting premium publishers,” says David Payne, Chief Digital Officer at Gannett. “Viewability provides us another proof point that shows how our premium content creates highly engaged audiences perfect for branding campaigns.”
"At VivaKi, we’re passionate about viewability because an ad served that is not viewable is an inefficient use of our clients’ resources,” says VP Audience Media Strategy Phil Shih. “In the future, viewable premium inventory will demand a higher CPM than unviewed impressions; but it’s worth it for the sake of growing your brand.”
Providing a common measurement metric is the foundation for a world where we can transact on viewable impressions. But measurement alone does not make viewable impressions a currency. For this, we need to develop technology that allows advertisers and publishers to not only measure, but also transact viewable impressions. We already enable this on the Google Display Network and, we’re also investing in tools on the DoubleClick platform to allow advertisers and publishers to value, buy, sell, serve and optimize to viewable impressions.
The transition to viewable impressions will not happen overnight, but as more brands, agencies and publishers adopt the viewable standard, we can create a more transparent and actionable display ecosystem for brand advertisers. We look forward to working with our clients and industry bodies to turn viewability into a new currency for the web.
Posted by Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager, Brand Metrics
Sign up to receive industry updates from DoubleClick in your inbox. Click here to opt-in to the DoubleClick Digital Marketing Newsletter today.
Yesterday, the Media Rating Council (MRC) announced that it is lifting its advisory on transacting on viewability for display advertising, originally issued in November 2012. In taking this step, the MRC is signaling that great strides have been made toward the goal of transacting display advertising using viewable impressions, and the industry is ready to begin the process of adopting viewable impressions as a standard metric. We applaud this move and are thrilled to see the industry move closer to the reality of a true viewability currency.
Google has been a longtime supporter of this effort and we’ve partnered with the industry, the Media Rating Council and the IAB, as part of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, to help guide the definition and adoption of a viewable impression standard. Last April our viewability measurement solution Active View received accreditation by the Media Rating Council and, in the coming months, we’ll be making Active View reporting available to all DoubleClick customers across our platform. We believe that giving marketers, agencies and publishers access to a common, integrated viewable impression metric will set the foundation for viewable impressions to become an actionable currency.
But measurement alone will not make viewable impressions a currency. To become a currency we need technology that allows advertisers and publishers to not only measure, but also transact on viewable impressions. In December, we took our first step toward making viewable impressions a true currency by giving advertisers the ability to target and buy only viewable impressions on the Google Display Network. We’ve seen a strong positive response as thousands of advertisers and brands have adopted viewable impression buying on our network, but we’re not stopping there. We’re investing heavily in Active View and working quickly to enable our DoubleClick platform clients to value, buy, sell, serve and optimize to viewable impressions across the web.
The MRC announcement represents an important milestone in the journey towards a viewable currency. As marketers and agencies adopt the viewable standard we can start to build a new display market that is more transparent and actionable for brand marketers.
Brands and their agencies want to better measure their digital campaigns, but they don’t want one-off science experiments or fuzzy numbers; they want metrics that are as meaningful and actionable as the click has become for performance advertising:
Did someone actually see my ad? And was it the right audience? What did people think about the ad? How did the ad change their mindset? What did people do as a result of seeing the ad?
As we invest to improve brand measurement for the entire industry in all these areas, we are keeping a few things in mind. First, measurement should be actionable - real time insights to improve campaigns as they run, not after-the-fact reports that can only improve future ad buys. Second, we know our clients want measurement that is open and transparent so we’re partnering with the industry to create metrics that serve as a true currency between buyers and sellers, and offer flexibility and choice to marketers.
Today at the IAB Leadership Summit, I gave an update on a few of our brand measurement products:
Active View Last year, comScore estimated that 54% of ads running on the web aren’t seen by the user. Maybe the reader scrolled past your ad; maybe she never got to it.
We’re supporting industry initiatives, like the IAB’s Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) to establish new standards. And late last year, we made it possible to buy based on viewability on the Google Display Network. This capability is based on our MRC-accredited Active View technology, a transparent and actionable viewability metric that we’re gradually rolling out to both marketers and publishers. It’s early days, but we’ve already seen more than 1,500 brands buying impressions based on viewability, across more than 100,000 sites on our network.
comScore vCE In TV, marketers use the concept of a Gross Rating Point (GRP), by which they measure the reach and frequency of their campaigns among different demographics. For digital campaigns, there are a number of options for marketers wanting a digital GRP across screens. For example, last year, we started testing comScore vCE (validated Campaign Essentials) and Nielsen OCR (Online Campaign Ratings) for campaigns on YouTube and across our network.
While we’re excited by the efforts in the industry to introduce GRPs to the digital market, we believe we haven’t yet reached the full potential of this metric. And so today, we’re excited to announce that we’re taking another step forward by partnering with comScore to turn vCE into a digitally actionable metric.
By working closely with comScore and the industry, we believe we can make a GRP metric that will be completely actionable: both advertisers and publishers will be able to see if a campaign is reaching the right audience in real time and make adjustments if it isn’t. No more waiting days or weeks for reports, no more wasted media, no more missed opportunities. This objective, third-party vCE metric is being built directly into our DoubleClick ad serving products, where it can serve as a transparent currency for both marketers and publishers to buy, sell and measure ad space across sites, formats and screens.
Brand Lift At the top of the pyramid, brands want to measure the impact of advertising on core brand metrics like awareness, favorability, purchase consideration and, ultimately, sales. We're developing a suite of Brand Lift products to help here. Last year, we began a small test of surveys to measure the impact of a brand's campaign.
Measuring ad effectiveness by conducting surveys is not new. But generally they’re slow to provide results, and get very low response rates.
In our early tests, we’re seeing 20-30% user response rates (significantly higher than traditional surveys), coming through in near real time. This enables brands to turn the results into immediate action: brands that are using Survey Lift have seen an 82% lift in ad recall, along with a 64% lift in brand awareness. For example MasterCard was able to double brand recall for one of their holiday campaigns based on insights gleaned from surveys. Based on this early promising feedback, we’ll be rolling these surveys out more broadly, for more types of campaigns, in coming months.
Going forward There’s lots more to come, and we're working on ways to help brands at all stages of the measurement pyramid. More actionable, open and transparent measurement will help bring more great campaigns and brands online, which in turn helps to fund web services and content. We’re looking forward to working with the industry and partners to help make this a reality.
