How industry actors are working on ad viewability issue
The measurement of ad viewability remains a pressing topic, although publishers had raised it many times before.
Viewability of ads is the metric that directly defines the revenue publishers receive. It also can be perceived as the way to squeeze more money out of advertisers. That’s why so many speculations and worries surround it.
Viewability metric tracks two parameters – the percentage of a visible space of an ad and the time it is visible for.
Picture source: AppNexus
IAB launches SDK to measure in-app ad viewability
The use of different third-party codes within your app is both complex and risky. A single SDK integration is a unified support for all solutions. And who could be better for providing a unified solution than the industry’s main standards setter?
IAB has offered a limited beta access to its own open source SDK for viewability measuring. Mobile app developers can insert IAB’s SDK into their app’s code and gather third-party analytics.
It will answer 4 important questions:
- if the ad has been viewed
- the time the ad has been viewed for
- the amount of impressions
- the invalid traffic volume
Open Measurement SDK has the following key adavantages:
- single integration,
- unified standards,
- increased volume of inventory that can be measured, and
- collaboration of industry actors based on open source nature.
New viewability standards and measurement tools
IAB didn’t bring up the topic out of blue. GroupM pioneered with an idea to switch from 100% in view to 50% for the ad banners viewability metric not so long ago. The main motivation was the influence of social media. Users scroll news feed so fast they might not even see the advertising.
GroupM’s next step is to define the metrics for video ads. They announced their plan to cooperate with third-party verifiers for the analysis of social media videos. The goal is to create new duration metrics for the videos played in social networks news feeds.
One more active doer in this direction is comScore. The company has launched its own free measurement tool. They also encourage to focus on other important metrics.
The developments on the viewability measurement will continue for sure. Don’t want to miss anything new? Follow our blog to get all important news from the digital advertising market.
