Understanding Viewability and its Importance

The main aim of digital advertising is to draw potential customers into utilizing the product and services. To make this conceivable, it requires that the ads reach the client in any way. Undoubtedly, in today’s digital world, many individuals across the globe invest a ton of energy on digital platforms. The whole idea of ads spins around associating with individuals and assuming that clients are online; that is actually where you ought to go.

Both the small and large organizations are progressively becoming more mindful of the various potentials that advertising on digital platforms can offer. You must have known about typical digital advertising methods, however, the concept of Viewability in the digital advertising circle is quite new and effective.

However, due to the rapid growth and innovation in the digital advertising market, people are still unaware of the actual meaning and importance of Viewability. Even viewability’s principles, and why it makes a difference for digital advertisers are still a mystery for some. Here, in this guide, we will clarify the concept of Viewability, why it is significant, and how it works.

What is Viewability?

Viewability is a metric in the digital ads system, and it helps to follow the ad impressions seen by real people. These impressions are also known as 'seen impressions’, but don't mistake the impressions on a PC or mobile screen. In simple terms, assuming you have an advertisement that shows at the lower part of a site and a visitor doesn't look far to the point of seeing it, therefore, in such a case, the viewability impression won't be recorded.

The term "viewed" implies that the standard definition demonstrates that a minimum of 50% of display ads should be in view for one second, and for video, it should be two seconds. These terms are set by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council (MRC); however, the rules might rely upon different elements and individual advertisers or media.

This idea means to beat a significant challenge that advertisers are looking for in the digital estimation space by empowering responsibility and creating more precise insights. To understand it more deeply, let's go through the importance of Viewability in advertising.

Importance of Viewability

Like different parts of marketing, Viewability is turning out to be progressively essential as the industry is growing. It's additionally a genuinely significant marketing metric for your business campaigns. Also, expectedly, it's considerably accurate for estimating reach. Keeping away from the disparity in ads served versus advertisements in view takes more detailed insights and conclusions into account. These viewability principles additionally make more straightforward ways to compare the metrics across distributors, as there's more consistency in their genuine effect. Eventually, Viewability organizes a more exact image of driving better outcomes for your business.

The reasons that justify the significance for digital advertisers are:

• Viewability guarantees you track real users or VS bots

• It also helps you to follow which advertisements energize more viewership and engagement 

• It helps the advertisers to get the insights to choose where to put ads that are bound to be seen.

As an advertiser, you decrease your promotional expenses by working with advertising platforms and paying only for viewable impressions.

Additionally, publishers receive significant viewability, and it also helps them to determine the actual performance of every ad placement space. For the publisher, Viewability implies they should reconsider and adjust viewability technology to fulfill advertisers' requests.

Why Do Ads Receive Less Viewability?

If you are an advertiser and experiencing less viewability on ads, you cannot find the exact cause behind it. Well, below are some main factors that are causing your ads with less viewability.

1. Inaccurate Position of Ads

One of the main causes of ads may not be visible is their placement. The advertisements might be placed "below the fold," for instance, refer to the segment of a webpage that is just noticeable with scrolling down to looking down. ‘Below the fold’ implies that an actual medium, similar to a newspaper, would need to be unfolded to see the ads, and digital content would require looking to see the advertisement.

It's essential to notice that placing ads "above the fold" doesn't always ensure viewability; however, different elements might affect whether or not your advertisement is seen. Yet, to enhance the viewability of ads, this method will work.

2. Channel

Channels can affect advertising viewability. These channels could incorporate small social media platforms, mobile applications, streaming TV, and others. Volume, commitment, and several advertisements can adjust a particular channel's performance, and accordingly, your promotion's performance.

3. Publisher

Publishers usually get various rates of viewability for their promotions. Some feature more non-viewable impressions than others. Even though a few publishers can likewise improve their viewability through third-party tools and programming.

4. Users are Using Ad Blocker

Ad blockers are another cause of low viewability as most users use Adblock, extensions that work on a network level. They conceal ads or block them from stacking. The issue is some ad-blocking tools sweep a page after it's loaded and search for patterns or HTML that contains 'advertisement’. Then these programs either hide or eliminate them. In the ad network, the impression is recorded when the advertisement is served to users; however, it's not apparent on the screen. Once you implement the viewability, it will assist to examine whether the ad is visible in the browser, and users can see it.

How to Improve Ad Viewability?

If you face low ad viewability and it's affecting your business and the expenses you put on advertisement publishing then it is time to consider this situation with all senses and take some steps to improve it. For your ease, below are some effective practices to improve your ad viewability.

1. Page Length

We have read earlier about the impact of page length on ad viewability. Studies have also shown that short pages have a superior viewability rate compared to bigger ones. Website pages that are more limited and have engaging content are sufficient to get users' consideration, which offers better opportunities to advertise views. So it is prescribed to keep the pages simple, short, and clean for customers.

2. Loading Speed

How about we acknowledge the harsh truth. No one seeks to wait longer than a few seconds for a page to load. If it takes time to load fully, there is no deficiency of substitutes available. According to Google's report, brands need to have their web pages optimized to improve loading time, including the advertisement delivery time.

By utilizing different performance improvement methods, you could smooth out your page to load quicker. Even so, there are some tools to speed up loading time, such as a tool from Google to analyze and acquire information about your site's performance.

Some effective methods to work on viewability, and resource loading are:

• Asynchronous Loading

   

  It assists the advertisement with loading the page resources freely. Google Publisher Tag (GPT) API and AdSense label help to guarantee that the ad is loaded autonomously and decrease bottlenecks during page load.

• Minimizing Passback

   

  It factors into diminishing the number of ad calls produced using various servers through pass-backs. This is great in ensuring quicker ad loading and better viewability.

• Lazy loading

   

  It helps to load the advertisements just when they are in the users' perspective. Therefore, lazy loading guarantees a higher chance of viewability and lessens the number of ads served out of the view.

3. Design Responsiveness

Responsiveness implies offering more prominent adaptability to your ads. This guarantees that your advertisements adjust based on the platform and the browser utilized for review. An ad designed with more amazing plan responsiveness will probably load accurately, offering a higher possibility of being seen than a non-responsive promotion.

4. Quality of content included

Having excellent content on your site page is possibly the most ensured method for further enhancing viewability. It is vital to have the content that is drawing attention and information that offers a higher possibility of sticking the customers to your website page, which thus ensures that the site visitor will see the ads.

5. Utilizing better ads channels

Regarding viewability, advertising channels rely on variables like user engagement, traffic volume on that channel, and advertisement frequencies. For each promoter and publisher, the creation needs are unique. For instance, some may explicitly search for mobile users, while others for desktop clients.

It is wiser to examine the channel-wise viewability and contrast this information to make ad formats to obtain the best outcomes. This will likewise assist you with aiming at explicit devices and channels where you obtain the best results.

6. Smartphone friendly

With the advancement in technology, users are likely to lean towards mobile usage rather than desktop or laptops. Therefore, it also impacted the web traffic, and it is seen that mobile web traffic globally is increasing rapidly.

Eventually, the amount of time spent on mobile phones is also increasing. It is essential to ensure that your ads have better smartphone responsiveness and viewability.

A few fundamental tips to have excellent mobile viewability are:

• Adding more space

   

  By leaving sufficient room between the content and advertisements, you will uplift the user's experience extraordinarily and prevent coincidental clicks, which users often hate. Likewise, you can keep away from visual clutter that could sneak in if the text and ads are set intently.

• Use Small banner sizes

   

  Creating ads for mobile devices is ideal for giving small banner sizes, normally 320×100 around the top, to fold to increase viewability.

7. Size and design of the ad

It is usually seen that ads are most seen when put right around the top on-site pages. Hence, it is vital to pick the right size for the advertisement to coexist with the page rapidly.

On average, the most visible sizes incorporate 728×90mm, 300×250mm, and 300×600mm. Vertical ads assist with holding the user's attention even when it is looked down the page.

For this, you can use sizes like 120×140mm, 240×400mm, 160×160mm, and 120×600mm.

Although, there are a few specific kinds of ad formats, such as Sticky advertisements and Dock promotions, that stick to the user's screen and help accomplish a superior viewability. Perhaps, if you are uncertain of the right size for your advertisement, you can easily use a couple of sizes and wait for the response.

How to Measure the Viewability Rates and Benchmarks?

Since now you know the concept of ad viewability and how to improve viewability, you must be thinking about how to check the viewability rate to improve further if required. Well, the Viewability rate is generally expressed in a ratio.

Ad vendors can't measure 100% of aggregate advertisement impressions. 'Measure and impression' are utilized instead. It is the number of advertisement impressions that an advertisement vendor can estimate.

Viewability = (Total viewable ad impressions/Total measured ad impressions) X 100

The above is the formula to get the viewability rate. However, if you know the number of impressions and estimated promotion impressions that you can get from your publicizing campaign, you'll have the option to determine your viewability rate. Perhaps, there are various viewability calculators that would serve the same purpose for you.

Advertisements with 70% or higher viewability performed better as far as click-through rates and interaction rates are concerned. It eventually depicts that the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) is right on target while suggesting the viewability norms of a minimum of 50% of the ad being in view for somewhere around one second.

Attractive and rich media layouts and designs are likewise answered to beat static banner advertisements in ad performance. In particular, the number of mobile ads was presented; they revealed higher viewability rates when contrasted with desktop ads. This affirms the shift of the publicizing industry to putting resources into more rich media ad platforms.

Conclusion

By now, it is crystal clear that ad viewability would impact the business and potential traffic to your website. With the rise in digital marketing, viewability will tend to rise with tremendous growth metrics as numerous advertisers are adopting this marketing strategy even though we can't predict the long-term impact of ads’ viewability on business. A business can expect the viewability norms implementation to grow at the initial stage to build potential customers.

By understanding the concept of viewability, you can follow this advertisement strategy to expand your business and website. However, if you face low ad viewability, the factors mentioned above to improve the viewability will help you. By examining the reasons for the low viewability rate, implement these steps to improve the results.