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The Surprising Lessons Learned by Buying a Few Billion Viewable Impressions - Digiday Brand Summit, 4/22/15
The document discusses viewability in digital advertising, highlighting that there is inconsistency in measurement across different vendors and that high viewability inventory is limited and tends to be more expensive. It emphasizes that optimizing for viewability can drive better performance, resulting in higher conversion rates and lower costs per acquisition. The report suggests that 2015 is a transitional year for viewability, advocating for common goals across vendors and addressing challenges in mobile and video advertising.
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The Surprising Lessons Learned by Buying a Few Billion Viewable Impressions - Digiday Brand Summit, 4/22/15
- 1. | Copyright 2015Quantcast | Confidential Lessons on Viewability Peter O’Sullivan Senior Sales Director, Western Region @Quantcast
- 2. 2 | Copyright 2015Quantcast | Confidential Data driven answers to your questions • Are vendors able to measure viewability consistently and accurately at scale? • What’s the average viewability seen on the RTB exchanges? • Does buying highly viewable inventory cost more than standard inventory? • Does viewability drive better performance? @Quantcast
- 3. 3 | Copyright 2015Quantcast | Confidential MRC accredited vendors are ready Measurement and viewability rates can still vary widely by vendor – up to a 40% gap. 89% 75% 47% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Vendor A Vendor B Vendor C 59% 56% 41% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Vendor A Vendor B Vendor C MeasurementRate ViewableRate Data from a representative desktop static display campaign using IAB standard package @Quantcast
- 4. 4 | Copyright 2015Quantcast | Confidential Limited supply of very high viewability inventory Inventory with viewability above 75% is less than 5% of all RTB inventory @Quantcast 38% 40% 19% 3% 27% 47% 23% 3% 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45% 50% 0-25% 25.1-50% 50.1-75% 75.1-100% %ofRTBimpressions Probability of being viewable 2014 2015
- 5. 5 | Copyright 2015Quantcast | Confidential Higher viewability is typically more expensive Inventory with viewability above 75% can be up to 2x as expensive as the average. 86 100 133 192 0 50 100 150 200 250 0-25% 25.1-50% 50.1-75% 75.1-100% Viewability eCPMIndex(100=RTBaverage) @Quantcast
- 6. 6 | Copyright 2015Quantcast | Confidential Higher viewability drives better performance CTRViewability Cost per Conversion 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% Pre Post 0.000% 0.010% 0.020% 0.030% 0.040% 0.050% 0.060% Pre Post $0 $50 $100 $150 $200 $250 $300 Pre Post +20% -50% +27% Education client CPA decreased by 50% after optimizing for viewability @Quantcast
- 7. 7 | Copyright 2015Quantcast | Confidential 2015 is the year of transition • Optimizing toward viewability drives better results – more conversions and customers as well as higher brand lifts • Optimal campaign performance is achieved around 55-65% viewability • Attribution remains a gap, so keep a level playing field by holding all vendors on a plan to the same viewability goal • Mobile and Video face fundamental hurdles that may push back full adoption @Quantcast
- 8. 8 | Copyright 2015Quantcast | Confidential| Copyright 2015 Quantcast | Confidential 8 Thank you! Peter O’Sullivan, Quantcast posullivan@quantcast.com
Editor's Notes
- #2 Hi everyone, thanks for having us today. I am Senior Sales Director, Western Region, at Quantcast , a technology specialized in audience measurement and real-time advertising. We were an early pioneer in online audience measurement back in 2006 and we continue to be today. We have insights on over 100 million web destinations and we are currently one of the top 5 largest processors of data in the world This unique digital footprint gives us one of the most in-depth understandings of digital audiences across the web and powers our Advertising product - acting on real-time audience behaviors and predicting your customers next move to get you there first. display or video, programmatic or direct, performance or brand. You are vying for your target audience’s attention so you can make an impression on them about your brand, product or service. For this to happen, you want your ad campaign to be viewable. One would think to be an easy feature to enable on campaigns resulting in increased ad exposure, effectiveness, performance etc… if not managed correctly, you may be doing much more harm than good. But Today, 100% viewability isn’t achievable for us in the near term, not just us, but for publishers and advertisers, for the entire industry. And there is one reason – Users….<<PAUSE FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT>> by saying we can achieve 100% means that we can predict what a user is going to do – people are unpredictable, we like to click away, scroll, open tabs in the background. 100% viewability means people are predictable, and we’re not. So why look at viewability? There are still a lot of benefits you can get when looking at viewability. By optimizing to viewability, you get better performance for both brand & DR advertisers. Viewability is becoming table-stakes in online campaigns today, and rightfully so. It enables you to measure if your ad was seen or not, drawing a clearer connection between ads that work and the lift in awareness or conversions they produce By monitoring viewability, you can also improve attribution by removing ineffective impressions from the purchase path
- #3 So what did the testing get us? When we started out, we wanted data-driven answers to our questions. At first, there were so many unknowns. Fundamental questions like….. So we designed experiments and tests to help us find the answers. Every major viewability vendor evaluated in multiple rounds of head to head testing Working with partners to measure: >1.5B impressions / month Across >10k Publishers And across every major RTB Exchange Optimizing toward viewability for 300+ clients on thousands of campaigns
- #4 Are vendors able to measure viewability at scale? What we found is that MRC Accredited measurement vendors are ready. Vendor A & B are MRC accredited, and Vendor C is not. For A & B, we see 75-90% measurement. With this, you’re getting a really good measurement of your campaign. However, not every vendor is able to do this. Vendor C is less than 50%, not a good way to get a representative sample of your campaign with less than 50% of impressions being measured. And this matters because the viewability rate returned can change significantly based on who you picked to measure. We see similar rates for vendor A & B are similar with only ~a 5% discrepancy., but we see almost a 20% drop for vendor c, who only measured 50% of total campaign impressions. What this means –who you pick for viewability matters!
- #5 The next thing we wanted to understand is what type of viewability can you get on the open RTB exchanges. When you bucket viewability by ranges- What’s important to note here is that tall lighter blue bar in the middle – almost 50% of inventory available today is in the 25-50% viewability range. It’s not a surprise, RTB average viewability is anywhere 45-50%, it’s because the majority of impressions fall in this range. Another thing to note, is that really high viewability, is less than 5% of inventory. If you mandate your ad campaign to have viewability of 75% or higher, you are limiting your scale and ability to reach your potential customers to just 5% of the entire exchange inventory. And This trend has not changed for the past two years One of the benefits of QC testing is that we can look back to see what’s changed. The MRC lifted it’s advisory about 1 year ago, so we went back 1 year to see what has changed in viewability. And you get this chart (the dark blue is 2014). What you notice is that pubs are redesigning pages and getting better viewability, but not a huge shift to the highest level of viewable inventory but rather publishers are actually shifting to the middle range – getting rid of low viewability inventory, but shifting to 25-50% viewability rather than above 75%.
- #6 Finally, we tried to figure out what kind of costs would we incur from buying more highly viewable inventory, and what we found was that above the 75% viewability, we see it’s almost 2x as much as the average. So while there isn’t a lot of inventory at that level, it’s also more expensive (simple supply & demand). Be prepared, when planning viewable campaigns, that there will be a premium on CPMs.
- #7 It’s impt to remember the final objective for advertisers, does viewability help my campaign performance? For every experiment & test, the answer is yes. Here is one example of many. For this study, we found that when you increase viewability (in this case increased by 20%), you decrease Cost per conversion and increase CTR. That’s the power of advertising. Ads that aren’t in view, don’t work.
- #8 So 2015 – the IAB released a note saying that 2015 is the year of transition for viewability. And we believe this is the year it’ll take off. What are the key takeaways: Optimizing toward viewability drives better results You don’t need to go to 100% viewability. Optimal campaign performance is 55-65% viewability, because at higher levels inventory isn’t there & costs more, but also because users aren’t browsing on pub pages that have shifted to higher viewability. If we want to find the right user, we need to find them on the pages their browsing. The attribution systems we have today don’t yet take into account viewability. That’s a huge gap. Quantcast is working with viewability & attribution vendors, to get viewability integrated into attribution, but it’s still a gap. Something to be aware of when you implement and measure your campaign success.It also means that you need to hold all your media vendors to the same goals & measure them the same way. Mobile & Video are still 2 hurdles we have yet to overcome. They face somewhat difficult technical challenges, and the industry hasn’t caught up as much as it has for desktop. So what can advertisers do today? The first step is measurement – every advertiser can benefit from understanding & benchmarking what viewability what they’re getting today Once you have that information – you can get into moderate goals, being able to achieve viewability & performance. There is also VCPM, where you only pay for viewable impressions, which is still evolving and changing – really only for advertisers who consider themselves “experts” and understand there are still challenges