Measuring ad viewability is an established and vital metric in the digital advertising industry for both publishers and advertisers alike – advertisers want to ensure they’re getting what they paid for and that their digital campaigns are actually being seen by real humans, and digital publishers in turn need to ensure their ad viewability is of the highest standard, so they can provide that assurance to their advertisers.
When it comes to making a marketing campaign successful, many additional factors come into play beyond the ad being in view. Online publishers also need to implement protections and safeguards to ensure brand safety measurements; in other words, to eliminate anything that could harm the brand’s reputation. Ad viewability and brand safety are very much interlinked and must be a priority for publishers.
How 24.com improved its visibility standard
Michael Allen, Head of Ad Tech at 24.com, and his team are responsible for making sure campaigns sold by Adspace24, Media24’s advertising sales division, always meet the highest viewability standards. To achieve this, they did a comprehensive audit of all the ad tags across News24 and other properties, measuring the desired viewability for each ad placement. This provided a baseline of where improvements could be made. How quickly ads render can have an immediate positive effect on ad viewability, and this was the first component they audited.
“It’s important that our ads load as quickly as technically possible, so part of the audit consisted of determining how our tags were implemented and what could be done to improve ad delivery. We ultimately took a completely different course to ensure our tags are always loading super-fast,” says Allen about the first phase of the project.
The team also implemented smart loading to improve viewability, by only rendering the ad creative once a user scrolls to the ad and it comes into view. This ensures advertisers and clients don’t waste their media budgets on ads that aren’t fully viewable. The team then ensured the ad tagging was as lean as possible, doing away with unnecessary code that might slow it down.
The audit took about a month and from there, Allen and his team generated clear action points to take back to the development team. This coincided with a complete brand design refresh. The entire process took around six months to complete, and the team regularly monitors viewability performance to ensure these standards are maintained.
Ensuring 24.com’s viewability standards exceed the industry benchmark
Achieving a healthy viewability standard is important, but as discussed earlier in this article, so is brand safety. This is why 24.com partnered with DoubleVerify (DV), an industry-leading software platform for digital ad measurement and analytics used by both publishers and advertisers.
Using the DV platform, the Adspace24 team can independently verify the viewability metrics gathered in their ad server and gain valuable insights for brand suitability. Packaged together, they can offer advertisers high viewability placements on their brand-safe environments and deliver far more insightful reporting on campaign performance.
Agencies that use DoubleVerify can also connect to 24.com’s DoubleVerify platform with "Quality Targeting Automation”, using DoubleVerify’s predictive algorithms in real time to automatically target inventory that is most likely to reach an advertiser’s viewability guarantees.
In a rapidly evolving digital advertising landscape, the pursuit of world-class standards in ad viewability and brand safety is essential to ensure the effectiveness and integrity of Adspace24’s digital campaigns.
