Retargeter

HOW DO YOU MEASURE VIEW-ABILITY?

View-ability is an increasingly important topic for all stakeholders in the display advertising ecosystem. It makes complete sense that marketers buying impressions would want their impressions to be viewed.  The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) defines view-ability as this;  a display ad is viewable if 50% or more of its pixels appear on-screen for at least one continuous second.

The problem is that while there is somewhat of a standard for what view-ability means, there isn’t a standard for how it is measured. It’s also impossible to measure every single impression.

Not having an industry standard often leads to conflicting information for advertisers. The methodology the view-ability measurement tool uses will have an impact on the score for the exact same campaign tracking identical impressions.

Although there’s no denying the ambiguity, we recommend that advertisers measure campaign view-ability by comparing view-ability reporting from a third party ad-server (i.e., doubleclick campaign manager) with ReTargeter’s view-ability metrics. Provided that advertisers have access to both, the combined reporting sources have impression pixels that are measuring view-ability, and you can aggregate the results to get a fairly accurate rating.

Moreover, there is some debate on the IAB’s definition of view-ability, and the idea of the fold. For example, is an ad displayed below the fold but surrounded by headline new context on the New York Times homepage unattractive just because a particular user didn’t scroll down? Some would still argue ‘yes,’ while an increasing population would argue ‘definitely not’.  It’s important to take the view-ability score for a particular seller/publisher or domain and make targeting adjustments in the context of your primary KPIs that can be clearly attributed to your campaigns.  It’s also important that you don’t limit a very finite retargeting campaign to a very high view-ability goal, as it can cannibalize the campaign altogether.

RETARGETER CAN HELP

ReTargeter/Sellpoints is buying media programmatically, so regardless of how view-ability evolves, we manage our media buying against the highest standard for our advertisers while keeping up with industry trends.

We establish campaign monitoring best practices using industry benchmarks; they are always evolving and maturing, but currently, we strive for 50% + and use real-time as well as third-party tools to make informed decisions about what impressions we buy. The aggressiveness with which we optimize to a view-ability goal depends on how targeted the audience is, as well as your other campaign KPIs.