Guide:
Overview
While marketers can use bid modifiers options like fold or select creative sizes that tend to yield higher page placement, additional measures are often needed to ensure ads are being seen. Viewability is the measurement of whether or not a user viewed an ad served to them. The Media Rating Council (MRC) is used as the industry standard for measuring online ads’ viewability.
What Is Viewability
Viewability measures whether an ad that was served was actually seen by a user.
There are several reasons a user might not see an ad. For example, the ad may have been served at the bottom of the page, or the user may have left the site before the page fully loaded. Applying viewability targeting helps advertisers pay only for impressions that have a chance to be seen by their intended audience. Setting a viewability target within the ad group settings can help marketers prioritize top-performing, viewable inventory by domain and ad size to achieve their desired in-view rate
Because viewability is measured differently across creative formats, the platform automatically applies the format-specific viewability standard and optimizes toward it:
- A Display impression is viewable if 50 percent or more of its pixels appear on the user's screen for at least one continuous second. (Note: For large display ads like $970 \times 250$, the ad is considered viewable when at least 30% of its area is visible for at least one second.)
- A video impression is viewable if 50 percent of its pixels appear on-screen for at least two consecutive seconds.
As with any marketing medium, and due to the nature of real-time bidding, we cannot fully control how often users interact with your ads or where an ad appears on a publisher’s page. As a result, marketers should expect that some ads and impressions will not be seen.
To help our users maximize their marketing budgets, Choozle proactively monitors the viewability of inventory run through our platform and applies to our platform-wide block list any sites with low viewability. Through our Brand Safety and Fraud Preventative Efforts, Choozle takes several measures using a three-tier system to ensure the quality of the sites we are serving on and to minimize the risk of fraudulent or non-viewable traffic.
Viewability Provider
Viewability settings leverage our DSP partner's open platform and its proprietary solutions for both pre-bid targeting and post-bid reporting, including Quality Alliance (QA), Integral Ad Science (IAS), and DoubleVerify (DV). Using the Viewability settings, you can easily target sites and publishers across different supply vendors with historically served inventory that meets or exceeds specific in-view rates
Quality Alliance (QA) Viewability Targeting is our DSP partner's proprietary pre-bid solution that enables you to filter sites and publishers with historically served inventory that meets or exceeds specific in-view rates. To calculate in-view rates, QA uses a predictive model based on proprietary historical viewability data gathered system-wide from a five-day lookback window. The model uses four vectors (supply vendor, site/publisher ID, device type, and ad format) to determine viewability scores for every bid opportunity. Each score is translated into a bid factor of 0 (block) or 1 (allow), ensuring you bid only on inventory predicted to perform at or above your selected rate. Because this score is based on historical data, it is a statistically informed prediction and is not a guarantee of viewability at the time of impression serving. Alignment between your pre-bid targeting (QA, IAS, or DV) and post-bid reporting vendor is recommended to minimize discrepancies.
How To Use Viewability
- Found within the Advanced Settings on ad groups, users can choose between display and video viewability type as well as set their viewability target (either 40%+, 50%+, 60%+, or 70%+). Setting a viewability target will apply an additional $0.18 CPM to only bid on impressions that historically have met or exceeded your target.
- Viewability reporting can be requested through your account manager or support center.
Best Practices
- Viewability is an additional layer of protection on top of Choozle’s three-tier fraud prevention system.
- As you increase your in-view threshold, it's important to adjust your base and maximum bids upward accordingly.
- In-app viewability tracking requires specialized technology (MRAID/OM SDKs) because standard web code is unusable; therefore, tracking coverage varies and depends on the specific app publisher's technical integration.
- In most campaigns, aiming for a viewability target between 50% and 70% is generally realistic, depending on your other targeting criteria.
- Viewability targeting is not available on Connected TV devices.