Pause Café #11 - Viewability

The viewability rate, in digital marketing, corresponds to the amount of ads which “at least 50% of the ad’s surface has to be seen for minimum one second” for 100 impressions of that same ad.

It is a ratio that allows to grade a placement regarding its viewability. Indeed, not all ads on websites are viewable.

It can be:

• ads integrated in the footer
• ads integrated in the header but that take some time to load
• ads that are hidden by other ad formats (video corner, mobile interstitial etc.)

This criteria is important for agencies because logically, the buyers and advertisers want vewable impressions. There are a lot of measurement tools that exist like google active view or companies like IAS or Meetrics. These measures are often done on the advertiser side.

It is really important for a publisher to take into account viewability; because regarding header bidding, a plublisher needs to have a fast tech to avoid making theorically vieawable placements not viewable.

More than our tool that allows fast broadcast and increases viewability, we have some recommendations for you :

• We had the experience with a publisher that had two different solutions set up : his adserver and a header bidding solution from a retargeting party. A bad integration created conflicts and slowed down the broadcasting of the ads and also created auto refreshs.
• Using only one technology and not testing several parties on the same page brings conflicts and glitches. Header bidding is done to be managed on the whole website because, to be efficient, it needs an entire deployment on a website, no half-measures.

We also now have a lazy loading feature which allows an ad to load and display itself only when it’s viewable on the website. For now this is adopted by publishers that have long articles and who integrate ads in the content, or publishers that use an infinity scroll system.