Viewable and Seen are not the same thing

There is a common misconception that when an online advert is deemed viewable it has been actually been seen by the end user, this is not the case, in fact ads deemed “viewable” by verification businesses like IAS, DoubleVerify & Moat are ads that have the opportunity to be seen because 50% of the ad is on screen for 2 seconds or more. 

This is a known limitation & recently many verification companies have expanded their feature set to include attention as a metric. As the name suggests this counts not just when an ad has the opportunity to be seen (it’s viewable) but also when the end user actually looks at the ad & gives it their attention. 

This sounds great, but we imagine at this point you’re probably asking yourself whether viewability and attention are closely correlated? Well wonder no longer, early research suggests that there is little correlation, indeed Impact’s internal tests revealed that some configurations of domain & creative get low levels of viewability, but significantly higher than average levels of attention.

See below for three domains we have been testing and the difference between viewable and seen:

This means that some sites that have very low viewable CPMs (vCPMs) actually have higher than average Seen CPMs (sCPMs). Given most advertisers care about their ads actually being seen as opposed to just having the opportunity to be seen, optimizing towards a low vCPM isn’t necessarily optimal.

So in a nutshell viewable does not equal seen & if you’ve not done so already, now is the time to upgrade your measurement to include attention & work with partners that can optimize towards this goal, or better yet work with Impact who only charge clients when their ads are actually seen.