EMEA > Ad Visibility

It probably doesn’t need stating, but digital media ad spend has grown quickly. Even in the current economic climate, 2011-2012 year-on-year growth for the UK is estimated at around 10%.

Digital advertising is more measurable and more accurate in determining who saw what and the actions they took as a result, and so more cost-effective.

The problem is this claim doesn’t tend to stand up to scrutiny.

Take click through rate (CTR); still often used as an indicator of response and user interest in many campaigns. Research by the Advertising Research Foundation in July 2012 found that even a blank ad could generate a CTR of 0.08%, and of that around half was due to accidental clicks.

Given the standard display CTR in the UK market is 0.07%, according Google, suddenly the intent behind any given click in most campaigns is unknown.

Similarly, numerous attribution models now exist in the market to determine which of a multitude of exposures in any given user journey are responsible for the end outcome. This is an important move forward from last-click, but still assumes the answer can be measured and understood, and in the case of static attribution models, as a stationary model.

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Sylvain Deffay is Country Manager, France at Infectious Media

As 2013 kicked off with the e-marketing conference in Paris, it seems that the importance of measuring online advertising viewability has impacted the French programmatic market. I was presenting along with several of my peers on the possibilities of viewability and where the technology is going, whilst Alenty presented jointly with AppNexus about their latest viewability app.

To date, viewability has been associated more with branding campaigns than performance, for obvious reasons. However, by ignoring viewability measurement in performance marketing, we are implying that the click remains the best measurement, and not the impression. It is time for us in France, with such a strong performance market, to explain and promote the efficiency of seen impressions in generating conversions, even without a click.

A measure of viewability can help us do this, and could not be more timely with the latest reports showing that, on average, anywhere from 30-50% of impressions are not viewed in standard run-of-network campaigns. The good news is we are now in a position to filter the real from the fake post impression conversions. Firstly, there is no need to account for post impression on unseen banners. Through comparing the uplift in conversions based on accumulated view-time, instead of just the usual frequency metric, each advertiser, and its trading desk, can now define which of the tracked post-impression conversions can be really considered as genuine conversions. This can be a great interim strategy to eliminate accounting for unseen impressions.

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TraderTalk TV is coming to Paris on March 06. TarderTalk TV provides the visual overview of the granular aspects of data-driven advertising – effectively, how all this technology, data and trading actually works (you can view all episodes here).

We will be inviting some of the leading figures in the French market along to provide insight into innovation as well as smart execution around technology and data.

The series will be profiling the best and brightest from across the buy and sell side to scribble on our now “world-famous” whiteboard. Details to follow on when these episodes will be posted.

The SafeFrames initiative is interesting because it emphasises that viewability is a very important topic. It shows that the industry is ready to make very important efforts to insure that ad-viewability will be correctly measured. Correctly means, “so robustly that it can be used for billing”. Many players in the industry dream of a world where unviewable ads are not invoiced anymore. The benefits will be shared among all the stakeholders and advertisers will, de facto, get more efficiency. Publishers may lose some inventory, but only the worst ones will be impacted. Ad-viewability will decrease the total inventory, which is the best way to increase prices.

This ideal world needs a robust viewability measurement method. Most viewability measurement companies have decent methods for non-iframes ads, but iframes make it more difficult. An iframe is a page within a webpage. Like all pages, it can be generated by any domain name, including a domain name different from that of the page where it is contained.

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The challenges of developing an industry standard for ad viewability rages on. The IAB (amongst other bodies) have attempted to bring some order to this via the Safe Frame initiative. ExchangeWire recently caught up with some of more progressive vendors in this space to get their thoughts on the initiative and whether it will provide the standardised framework the industry clearly needs. First up, is Spider.IO.

What are SafeFrames?

Currently there are two ways for a publisher to include display ads on a web page: inline or within iframes. This provides publishers with a stark choice.

By including an ad inline, a publisher is including an ad in the same way that a publisher would typically include, say, an image. This type of inclusion provides advertisers with full transparency into where ads are placed and it also allows rich ad interactions—in particular, it allows expansion and contraction of ads. However, this type of inclusion also allows negligent or malicious advertisers to break site functionality; to steal data from the host page or from the user; to rewrite any content on the host page; or even to redirect a user to a page on an entirely different domain.

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The adoption of real-time advertising in the UK and Europe is becoming mainstream. Effective real-time bidding (RTB) campaigns have been running at scale for a number of years, however this buying method is now the first choice for online performance campaigns, and major advertisers are starting to issue RFPs specifically for programmatic media buying and analytics services, something that was unheard of 12 months ago.

The following report was researched and written by Infectious Media using aggregated and anonymised campaign data from Impression Desk. The findings, whilst specific to Infectious Media, represent work carried out for clients spanning all industry sectors with differing objectives, budgets and target audiences, which may be indicative of industry wide trends.

Northern European CPM Hot-Spots

The German-speaking “DACH” countries and the Nordics have the top-valued inventory in Europe, commanding the highest CPM impressions. Austria has come out on top, with Denmark and Finland closely following. In the second tier are Switzerland, Germany, Sweden and Norway.

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If you haven’t heard the name spider.io before, it is likely you are not alone. Like many good European ad technology companies, they have been flying under the radar. However, quietly but surely, they are building the technology which could change the way ad viewability is measured, and which could, in fact, bring viewability measurement to every ad impression across the industry.

For those unaware, the ad viewability space is pretty messy. In August, it was reported that comScore had launched a patent infringement lawsuit against three ad verification companies: AdSafe, DoubleVerify and MOAT. At the heart of this lawsuit are a set of patents controlled by comScore (but actually owned by Nielsen. See? It’s messy…) that govern an approach to measuring ad viewability used by almost everyone in the industry. In the industry this is termed the geometric approach. It involves comparing the size and the position of the ad against the size and the scroll position of the browser’s viewport. The result is a measure of whether the ad is within the browser’s viewport, and accordingly viewable.

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Stuart Byrne is Ebiquity’s UK Head of Digital

To see or not to see, that is the question. Too many digital ads never get seen. A huge chunk of digital display could be being seen by precisely no one. That’s advertiser money wasted and a poor buying strategy.

If this happened in outdoor, there would be an uproar, but just because an ad has been ‘sent’ to a computer – impression served – doesn’t guarantee that it’s actually seen, or even been rendered on a user’s machine.

Research that we’ve carried out in Germany shows that for many advertisers only 71% of their digital placements can actually be seen.

Based on diverse campaigns, and more than a billion served ads, the study found that while expandable formats were more likely to be seen by website users (80% visibility), some half-page ads were only 57% likely to be viewed.

It’s not just a problem in Germany. In the US, comScore has released software designed to measure the number of viewable impressions. Based on the principle that 50% of the ad must be visible for one second, a two-month study of campaigns for 12 big brands, including Kraft Foods, Ford and Sprint, found that 31% of 1.7 billion ad impressions were never in view.

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