More data has come out today that suggests roughly half -- or in this case 54% -- of digital ads aren't even viewable.
Ad impressions that are above the fold are viewable 49% of the time. Below-the-fold impressions become viewable just 30% of the time.
Highlighting the digital advertising industry's transparency concerns is the data that marketers don't know whether or not a full 40% of their viewable ads were placed above or below the fold. The fact that marketers don't know where nearly half of their viewable ads are initially placed is important because viewability metrics are often one benchmark of success for a campaign.
The data comes from Infectious Media, a company founded in 2008 that specializes in real-time advertising. They defined "viewable" in their infographic the same way IAB does: at least half of the ad must be in view for a minimum of one second.
The infographic also says that campaign performance is tied more closely to exposure (how long the ad was viewable) than frequency.
There are some companies that track the difference between "viewable" and "seen." Essentially, just because an impression was viewable doesn't mean it was seen. Recent data suggests the actual seen rate of online ads is closer to 14%.
COMMENTARY: The initial version of this article incorrectly attributed the 54% figure to Infectious Media. That particular figure came from comScore's vCE Benchmarks study from June 2013.
According to comScore's "2013 U.S. Digital Future in Focus" report, nearly 6 trillion display ad impressions were delivered across the web in 2012 as brand marketers become increasingly comfortable with a medium capable of delivering strong marketing ROI. Despite delivering so many impressions, comScore research showed that an average of 3 in 10 ads are never rendered in-view, leading to significant waste, weaker campaign performance and a glut of poor-performing inventory that imbalances the supply-and-demand equation and depresses CPMs. Through the continued adoption of a viewable impressions standard, the market is beginning to embrace a digital scarcity model that better aligns monetization with the value created by the inventory. By moving to the same “opportunity-to-see” standard for ads as TV, digital campaigns are increasingly comparable across media and marketers can more accurately evaluate their performance and optimize their marketing mix.
That’s consistent with what comScore said in 2012 report when it found that 31 percent of ad impressions are never seen by consumers. Even though this is ongoing issue, the report says we should “look for advertisers to demand more accountability and publishers to reconfigure their site design and ad inventory to improve performance in the coming year.”
More broadly, large advertisers are getting smarter with their ad buys, comScore says, using programmatic buying and improved targeting, so they don’t need to increase their ad buying as much as in the past. For example, there were 144 advertisers delivering more than 1 billion ad impressions in the fourth quarter of 2012 — pretty steady compared to the 145 in the same period of 2011.
Who are these large advertisers? Well, the top advertiser by impressions was AT&T, followed by Microsoft, Experian, Verizon, and State Farm. (AT&T was the biggest advertiser last year too.) The biggest advertiser category was online media, followed by retail and finance.
Ad management/distribution platform provider DG MediaMind finds that 63% of 16.1 billion rich media digital advertising impressions displayed in September 2012 was viewable. As explained in a new report, viewability measures whether at least 50% of an ad’s pixels are viewable for at least one second.
Rich media viewability rates varied by both vertical and format. The travel vertical had the highest overall viewability rate (73%), followed by corporate, CPG and news media (68% each) and careers, auto and B2B (67%). The financial vertical had the lowest viewability rate (50%) by a wide margin — the next-lowest rate was 58%, held by the telecom vertical.
Similarly, rich media viewability rates also varied considerably by format. The commercial break vertical had a close to perfect (97%) viewability rate, followed closely by floating ad reminders (96%) and wallpaper ads (83%). The enhanced standard banner format had the lowest viewability rate (54%).
The report, "DG MediaMind Full-Year 2012 Global Benchmark", also shows that rich media viewability rates have a measurable impact on overall digital ad performance. Worldwide click-through-rates (CTR) of viewable ad impressions were 0.34% - a 54.5% lift from the 0.22% CTR of all ad impressions.
Courtesy of an article dated October 30, 2013 appearing in MediaPost Publications RTM Daily and an article dated April 10, 2013 appearing in CMS Wire
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