How an over-emphasis on viewability can harm your campaign
Advertisers insisting on ad viewability rates of 80 per cent and over are inadvertently jeopardising the overall reach of their campaign, as only three per cent of media inventory in the UK can deliver such results, according to research.
The findings come in a study released today (9 February) by Quantcast called ‘Viewability: what smart marketers need to know’, which gathered the findings over the course of three years by measuring the delivery of over 5 billion ads each month across 10,000 publishers.
With 97 per cent of ad inventory delivering an average viewability rate of 80 per cent or lower, Quantcast also found that only six per cent of advertising inventory can deliver an average viewability rate of 70 per cent.
For advertisers aiming at these high viewability goals this can seriously harm their ability to deliver an entire campaign and therefore achieve their desired reach, according to Quantcast.
It went on to highlight how advertisers aiming for viewability rates of 75 per cent-plus would have to pay nearly twice as much as those buying standard real-time bidding (RTB) inventory available on average.
For advertisers aiming at such high viewability goals, it can seriously damage their ability to deliver an entire campaign, thus failing to achieve their desired reach, according to the study.
Commenting on the findings Matthew White, Quantcast’s UK managing director, acknowledged that viewability is - and will continue to be an important metric to asses a campaign’s success. However, the current scale of the problem with viewability means assessing the impact of high viewability rates on a campaign’s overall goals means it remains ambiguous.
“The results of our research shows that, as an industry, we still have a long way to go, not just in terms of viewable inventory but in the way that we evaluate our online campaigns,” he added.
Ad viewability rates continue to concern advertisers, especially as programmatic media buying technologies become the mainstream way of trading media. However, while the inventory has largely agreed upon a standard definition of a ‘veiwable ad’, it has still to come to a consensus on how to measure this.