Ad impressions must make an impression
It is well known that the amount of ad impressions does not equate to the number of actual ad views, but staggering new research from comScore has revealed the full extent of the challenge facing advertisers. Vibrant Media’s head of UK sales, Sam Pattison, explains…
Over half of all online ads (54 per cent) are never seen by website visitors, comScore found – far in excess of its previous estimate of 31 per cent. What’s worse, the median figure for lower tier sites is less than a third (also 31 per cent). These figures should give any digital marketer sleepless nights – especially if they are paying on a cost per thousand impression basis.
It’s obvious that if an ad isn’t seen, it won’t make an impression on the consumer. Yet marketers purchase many thousands of impressions and rely on the click through rate to assess performance. They purchase such campaigns with precious little guarantees that consumers will actually see a single ad.
There are few means of measuring when ads appeared above the fold, rendered correctly or appeared as anything more than a 1 x 1 pixel on a website. Nevertheless, many digital ad providers report such instances as displaying an effective ad, even though in such cases the ads are invisible to the consumer.
This is the problem of ‘viewability’ and it should instill within marketers a drive to seek technologies that work to ensure that a person will see each ad placed in a campaign, and demand accurate reports of the number of ads that have been viewed by people.
For far too long the online ad industry has been able provide reports that simply state whether ads have been technically served to computers, but not the number of ads that have actually been seen by people – however, greater focus on viewability will deliver a more accurate and trusted method of evaluating the success of digital ad campaigns.
The effort to develop a comprehensive viewability metric is still in its infancy. Currently, progress is being led by a group of US advertising trade associations with the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) project, which argues for online advertising to move to a true ‘viewed’ metric, rather than a bald figure of the number of ads served.
The 3MS project is admittedly a start, but it hardly sets a high benchmark for success: under its criteria, an ad counts as ‘viewed’ if half of its pixels are in view for at least a second. comScore used this very criteria in its latest viewability research, which puts its findings into an even starker light.
The importance of viewability is further underscored by the huge disparity in the effectiveness of different levels of ad engagement. comScore found that when ads achieved a degree of interaction – for example, users hovered over, or played rich media content within the ad – they achieved conversion rates of 0.49 per cent.
By comparison, the conversion rate measured on the basis of gross impressions was just 0.17 per cent – barely a third as likely to result in a sale. As interaction depends utterly on the ability for consumers to see the ad, it’s clear how important a robust viewability metric is to the industry, for both increased interaction and increased sales.
We should all welcome the fact that industry associations have had the initiative to take the first steps in tackling the issue with the 3MS campaign, but it only marks the beginning of the journey towards establishing a rigorous and meaningful standard.
If we are ever to establish a standard for defining and measuring viewability, we urgently need online ad companies – in the UK and around the world – to start contributing to the 3MS project, and adding their own opinions and expertise to the debate.
However, more rigorous standards of viewability will not be achieved until brands themselves make ad supplier and technology choices that prioritise the issue. There are three main areas which marketers must consider when selecting campaigns to maximise viewability: ad format, placement and reporting.
Opting for intrusive ad formats is not the answer, as intrusion causes irritation, and consumer irritation damages brand perception. This is particularly an issue for online video advertising campaigns that force consumers to sit through pre-roll ads before permitting them to view content.
Such ads should perform well in viewability terms, however, such high levels of viewability often come at the cost of annoying consumers, or having them get up to make a cup of tea before watching their desired online video.
Marketers must choose formats that enhance, rather than intrude on consumers’ content experiences. One of the most powerful ways of limiting any feelings of intrusion is to choose formats that actively give the consumer a choice over whether they wish to initiate ads in the first place.
Marketers must request guarantees that ads will be placed where consumers will focus their eyeballs. This is as much about the contextual relevance of the ad to the content as it is about the physical placement of the ad on the screen – whether mobile, tablet or desktop.
Ads must be placed on consumers’ screens in ways that enhance the content experience, not detract from it – but no matter how considerately placed the ad on the screen, if the brand is irrelevant to the content, the ad serves only to attempt to distract the consumer from what they are actually interested in.
Consumers are far more likely to view the full creative of a digital ad when its obvious that the brand and its messages add value to them at that point in time.
Finally, marketers need to start asking their ad providers for viewability metrics – preferably a simple report on the number of consumers that saw the whole of their ads as they were designed to be viewed. The industry’s current ‘viewable ad metric’ of half an ad’s pixels in view for at least a second creates an unnecessary complexity.
The industry’s objective should be to make measurement make sense. After all, marketers don’t spend their time, ingenuity and budget developing ads to achieve only partial viewability. Marketers pay for consumers to see their full ad creative and all of the ads that they’ve paid for.