Q-Tag: A transparent solution to measure ads viewability rate in online advertising campaigns

Abstract

The viewability standard defines the visibility conditions that an ad impression has to meet (e.g., 1 second and 50% of the pixels for display ads) to achieve the sufficient marketing effect to be considered viewed. Viewability is one of the most important metrics used by advertisers and ad-tech stakeholders to measure the performance quality of ad campaigns. The ad-tech industry offers opaque measures of viewability whose performance is questionable. To address this issue, we propose a novel methodology for measuring viewability in ad campaigns. The disclosure of the functional details of this technique and the availability of the code makes it reproducible and auditable. Our solution has been deployed in production by a Demand Side Platform (DSP) to measure the viewability rate of its ad campaigns. Leveraging the infrastructure of this DSP, we have compared the performance of our methodology with a popular commercial solution. Both techniques report a similar overall viewability rate of 50%. However, our solution can measure the viewability in 93% of the served ads by the DSP, in contrast to 74% measured ads by the commercial solution. A ballpark estimation indicates that this significant increase of the measured ads rate may translate into a revenue increase of $3.5 million per year for a mid-size DSP serving 100M ads per day.