Next up - viewability. The internet is a big place, and you don’t want to spend time and money on a campaign that just gets lost in the void!

An ad might be ‘served’ to a user or counted as an impression, but that doesn’t necessarily mean someone has actually seen it. If your ad is shown ‘below the fold’, then it’s only visible if the user goes to the effort of scrolling down the webpage. And sometimes, an impression is counted before a web page has even loaded, by which point the user might have already left - clicking away without ever having seen your ad. This is why viewability is now a valuable metric for many businesses, which gives you an indication of how much attention your campaigns are receiving.

Viewability is calculated by dividing the number of viewable ads by the number of measured ads, and multiplying that by 100. The result will give you a percentage, showing how many of your ad impressions were actually viewable.

Ideally, all of your campaigns should be aiming for a minimum level of viewability, but keep in mind that the criteria for this will depend on the formats you use. A display ad is deemed ‘viewable’ if at least 50% of it is on show for one second or more, and this becomes two seconds for video ads.

When it comes to both brand safety and viewability, another challenge many businesses face is ad fraud. The most common type of ad fraud involves ‘bots’ that mimic high-quality ad space or trigger fake ad impressions. For the advertiser, this means wasting ad spend on campaigns that are never actually seen by real people.

The good news is that there are a number of third-party tools available to help you improve brand safety, monitor viewability and mitigate the risks of ad fraud. They can block your ads from appearing in unsafe places and reduce the amount of fraudulent impressions your ads receive. You can also use these tools to keep an eye on the overall quality of your ad campaigns, tracking whether they’re appearing in safe environments and if the ad impressions were viewable. Any tools you decide to use should be included in the brand safety policy that you share with your teams and agency.

If your business already has its own partnerships and contracts with these tech providers, then any agencies you work with can use these to activate campaigns on your behalf. Keep in mind though that most agencies usually have their own preferred partners and solutions, but as long as these tools offer your brand the right level of protection, then this shouldn’t be a cause for concern.

Viewability & Ad Fraud