advertising

Viewable Impressions Offer a New Standard in Advertising

Nearly every advertiser, regardless of size, comes face to face with click-fraud. The problem causes rates for ineffective keywords to rise, and conversions and engagement to tank. It’s a major problem that the industry has been wrestling with for some time. It’s also costing advertisers and networks billions of dollars.

Fortunately, ad networks have a new weapon against bot traffic, a way to identify an impression and certify it as an impression that came from a real human. The new standards for viewable impressions could protect advertisers, offer guaranteed rates of engagement and open up new opportunities for online advertising.

What Makes an Impression Viewable?

Analytics software records impressions, and offers the time spent metrics. Together, those two stats give some clarity to what a user does on your website. Bounce rate also tells a story, but not the whole story. Bounce rate tells an advertiser when a user has left the page without action , and it used to be that the answer was “the ad wasn’t working.” Bot traffic obscured results. It could be the ad’s performance, but it could also be fraudulent clicks and for a long while there wasn’t an easy way to distinguish. Ad networks can easily spot click fraud today, which creates a more secure bidding environment.

That’s where viewable impressions come into play. They refer to a page view, but they have some special designations attached to that. For one, a viewable impression can have a specific time spent, like ten seconds. Viewable impressions also track how much of an ad is shown, so users must be able to see at least 50 pixels of an ad, for example, for the impression to count. Timed ads also make a difference, as the user is likely to stay engaged with something like a video pre-roll if it means the content they want is only fifteen seconds away.

As it stands, networks are measuring for bots so the infrastructure already exists to track human interaction.

Buying Viewable Impressions

The demand for viewable impressions has risen steadily as a result. Although the process is new, the potential for human-verified interaction is huge. Buy traffic from companies who have been certified to measure against the 3MS standard. Make sure that you are buying ads that will show for an extended period of time (longer than a few seconds at least) and that your ads are shown to the user. Without guaranteed pixels, you don’t know how much of the ad is visible to the user.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is an advertising and marketing professional, and the CEO of engage:BDR. Ted Dhanik has extensive experience in direct advertising since the early 2000s. Ted Dhanik blogs frequently, and his writing has been featured on Venture Beat and Ad Age.