Basis Spotlight: Viewability Targeting and Tracking Provides Peace of Mind for Your Ads

If an ad appears on a website but users don’t have the opportunity to see it, was the ad really shown?

Every year billions of dollars are spent in display ads. Advertisers are consistently developing more creative units to attract and engage customers, while publishers continue to improve their sites so ad placements can be seen by visitors. However, not all ads have the chance to be looked at by humans, resulting in an unfortunate waste of ad dollars.

One of the mechanisms that has surfaced to address this problem is the introduction and standardization of viewability. The Media Rating Council (MRC) deems viewable an ad for which at least 50% of the pixels are in view for at least one continues second, to ensure that they can be seen by the human eye. Media-tech and mar-tech companies have developed two strategies to achieve this goal in the form of pre- and post-viewability solutions, both available in Basis.

Pre-bid viewability uses historical observations and measurements about an ad placement before making a bid on it. If the technology determines it meets the criteria chosen by the client, it will bid on the placement, otherwise it won’t. These are available as segments provided by some of our partners including: comScore, Double Verify and Peer 39.

Post-bid viewability is the true measurement of an impression, informing you if an ad was viewable or not. To introduce this in Basis, Centro has partnered with Pixalate – the first and only data platform with a comprehensive suite of products specifically built to bring transparency to programmatic advertising. They are a MRC accredited vendor for display ad viewability, and Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) detection and filtration for desktop and mobile web traffic. Unlike other vendors, they provide a higher degree of transparency, supplying Basis users with information on viewability down to the placement level. Tracking viewability results can be done by enabling the feature in the campaign editor.

So which one should you use? The good news is you can implement both technologies at the same time to evaluate if you are achieving the goals you desire!

Applying a pre-bid segment with a viewability rate greater than 70% means that your ads will only bid on placements that have been categorized to have a high viewability rating, however you may want to know what these inventory sources are and what their exact rating is. Enabling post-bid viewability measurement will let you know exactly how many impressions purchased were measured, and viewable. Having this insight allows you to optimize inventory accordingly, or make changes to your campaign’s settings. Is a particular ad size or creative type having a better response than others? Is a placement in a site relevant to your product not performing the way you expect it to? Is web traffic on certain days higher, thus creating too many distractions for customers to see your ads? You can use all these data points to make the improvements in the way your campaign is set up to attain your end goal!

If you want to see our post-bid viewability in action, contact us today.