What's wrong with viewability?

Take a scroll around the web and you'll see that ads load when you've already scrolled past that part of the page or when you haven't scrolled far enough down yet. Those ads may never be seen if the user doesn't continue to scroll around the page. It's a massive waste of computing power to load ads that won't be seen and it doesn't have a benefit for marketers either.

Then the industry came up with Viewability. If you were buying media in 2016, a pretty quick way to hack viewability was to only buy ads above the fold since they start out being within the viewport of the browser. It wasn't long before sites were redesigned with slideshows and 3-4 ads above the fold to maximize revenue based on viewability. As agencies latched on to viewability, some even mandated 100% viewable placements and incentivized the proliferation of what later became known as MFA.

Now the industry has decided we need "net-zero media buying" to make up for the massive waste that wouldn't have happened if we weren't buying long tail sites from 50+ exchanges in the first place. Every half-baked solution seems to create more problems than it solves.

Viewability

MRC-accredited vendors can report 70-90% average viewability. Yet on the open web ads also continue to load even if the browser tab isn't active, if the browser is minimized, or if there's another program open in front of the browser. These ads cannot be seen, but the MRC-accredited verification tools would still consider this a viewable ad.

The viewability percentage reported by these vendors doesn't even make sense because it doesn't account for normal human behavior. Consider a site like Yahoo Mail - you can't miss the ads on the right-hand rail. They are 100% viewable. But on a real human's computer, this site may be open all day on a secondary tab while they work on other things. Humans are only navigating to the page if they are sending or have received an email. They aren't seeing the ads that continue to refresh all day even though the ads are in highly viewable placements on the page.

FouAnalytics measures viewability and takes these additional factors into account before reporting viewability (see: Viewability, IVT, Out-of-Geo, Brand Safety in FouAnalytics). That's why you won't see those same erroneously high viewability measurements in FouAnalytics.

Did the Ad Run?

Did the impression you paid for even render on screen? DSPs charge you for bids won. Google's Campaign Manager counts an impression when the creative begins to download. FouAnalytics tag runs asynchronously so you can use measure impressions where the creative is rendered on screen. In mobile environments especially, the programmatic bidding and ad serving process can be too slow and you will scroll past the empty ad slot before the creative fully renders. How could the ads be 70% viewable if 30% of the ads never were served by the ad server and another 10% were never rendered on screen?

Off-Page Ads

In more nefarious cases, the ads may load completely off-page.

FouAnalytics detects off-page ads and reports the domains that are doing that. You can decide to turn them off.

You can visualize off-page ads in the FouAnalytics pageXray tool. You can also find it in the data if you view the "page-frame-list" parameter. Within the page-frame-list you'll see what size ads served and the location of those ads on the page. The way these strings in the screenshot read is the (ad size)@(position of the upper left corner of the ad on the page)#(who served the ad). This list includes 0x0s iframes that are used for cookie sync operations that track users. But you may notice in the top row, to the very right it says "300x250@57x-81..." - the negative number indicates the ad was off-page. You may want to select this data and copy into excel to more closely inspect all the frames on a page.

This is just a few examples. FouAnalytics shows you how viewability is measured so you can verify if it was measured correctly. If you would like to try FouAnalytics side by side with your existing measurement partner, I can set you up. You can run a free trial and "See Fou Yourself" if the legacy verification companies are doing the job you paid them to do.