What’s more important, CTR or your ad being viewed? We’ll wait while you think about this….
What did you decide? Was it viewability? If that was you’re answer then you got it right! Think about it, your ad being seen is far more important than click through rates especially with the rise of bot technology. You could be getting false results. So, what is ad viewability? Viewability is the “seen” impressions that a video gets where 50% of the advertisement must be in view for at least one second for display ads and two seconds for video ads (Internet Advertising Bureau). Measuring views is the best way to see what kind of reach your brand is getting with its advertising and it has a positive correlation with ROI. The higher the views, the higher the ROI. There are a few factors that will affect your ads viewability.
1. Size. Vertical layouts are preferable to vertical and some standard sizing options are 120x240, 240x400 and 160x600.
2. Position. Side bars do well. Top of page may be the first that comes to mind because it’s the first thing you see. However, sometimes the ad does not load before the user scrolls past. Of course, you can put the ad at the top and bottom and there are standard practices to help them perform well.
3. Channel. Where you place the ad matters. Is it social, streaming T.V., YouTube?
4. Publisher. Each publisher will have varying rates for placements.
5. Loading speed. DO NOT let your ad load slowly. This is death for advertisements and anything else for that matter. Even just 1 second delay can reduce views by 11% (Publift). There are technical adjustments that can and must be made in order to avoid this. Compressing files, reduce redirects and removing unnecessary tags are some to name a few.
Ad viewability is important and compliment other data for your brand but this concept is fairly new. It will continue to develop in the following years but having a score of 70% viewability or higher perform better overall. That being said, a lot are between 30-40% and still successful, according to Amazon Ads. Being able to monitor this metric is important to tracking how many real human views you are getting for your advertisements.
