CVD study suggests huge wastage in online advertising in Western Europe
By Timothy Whitfield, Global Director of Technical Innovation
The Issue: Impressions are sold but never seen
Brand awareness tools have recently become a very hot topic in more advanced digital media marketplaces. The primary objective of these tools is to ensure that the advertiser’s brand is displayed in an optimal fashion i.e. “above the fold”. The corollary of this type of technology is the ability to measure the percentage of booked impressions that are never seen. In other words, those impressions delivered “below the fold”.
Publishers’ web sites are often redesigned to keep their look fresh, keep the interest of their loyal user base and ultimately extend their own reach. One key factor when redesigning a publisher’s web site is to maximize their online advertising revenue by placing advertising heavily throughout each page. The problem therefore is that many web sites are becoming very “tabloid” in fashion and require the user to page or scroll down many times before they reach the bottom of the page. In this scenario, the advertisements that are loaded in the bottom and side positions are often not visible. In fact, this study by the Facilitate Digital Consulting Team established that, across 6 markets in Western Europe, 34% of booked impressions are never seen by a user.
What is Creative Visibility and Duration Reporting?
Facilitate Digital launched CVD (Creative Visibility and Duration) reporting to its European hub in June 2011. This exciting new reporting is designed to measure the average amount of time that any creative is displayed on the screen. There are two clear goals of the CVD product.
1. Goal for Media Agencies – What % of Media Spend is wasted due to publishers running the creative in placements that are never seen by a user
2. Goal for Creative Agencies – What is the average amount of time spent looking at a creative, then compare that to the time required for the message to be displayed within the creative. For instance, if the creative message takes 10 seconds to “tell its story” but on average people are only looking at the creative for 8 seconds then it can clearly be concluded that the creative message is too long, people are not seeing the full creative message, and therefore much of the power of the advertising is lost
Key Findings
In the study Facilitate Digital collected the CVD data for many clients across the entire European market from July to September 2011. In order to ensure the best quality outcome the study only included campaigns that delivered more than 1 million impressions in total and more than 1 thousand impressions per day. In total the study had over 1 billion delivered impressions for CPM Impression and Click tracked placements. For a view to be counted then the creative must have been 100% visible for at least 1 second.
Table 1- Ad Visibility by Market
View Rate is the % of impressions that were known to be seen. This is calculated by taking the overall impressions and subtracting the number of impressions whereby CVD measurements were not counted such as iFrames and then dividing that by the total number of impressions delivered.
CTR is simply the Clicks divided by the Impressions expressed as a percentage. Note that Click Only placements and CPC buy types and 1×1 tracking has been removed from these numbers.
CTRa is the Adjusted CTR once the Visibility is taken into account. This is calculated by dividing the clicks by the impressions minus the unseen impressions.
CTRi is the Improvement in the CTR. This is calculated by subtracting the CTRa from the CTR and then dividing this by the CTR.
The results above show a very simple breakdown of the Visibility rates per market. It is demonstrated that visibility rates are slightly higher in Germany (68%) and Switzerland (79%) compared to other countries such as UK (65%) and The Netherlands (48%). Following consultation with local media agency clients, it is felt that the reason why Germany and Switzerland have a higher visibility rate is because they are more aware of the issue and have already started to engage with the Publishers to negotiate inventory of better quality.
The table above also shows the Click Through Rate (CTR) per market. It is possible to see that the CTR in the “Germanic” countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland are higher than the rest of Europe. Again, the reason for this is because German agencies have already started to tackle the problem of removing lower quality inventory from media buys. To assist them in this process, Facilitate Digital can also produce CVD reporting broken down by the real domain where the advertising is delivered. This makes it possible for agencies to remove the lower quality inventory from a standard RON or Affiliate buy.
In the report above, it can also be seen what the CTR would have been had the unseen inventory been removed from the calculations. On average the CTR would increase by circa 29%. Naturally, it also stands to reason that the CPM, CPC and CPA rates could also be adjusted accordingly, however for privacy reasons these numbers cannot be published.
These numbers can also be reviewed by format. In Table 2 below, it can also be seen that Half Page Ads (300×600) have the highest visibility for obvious reasons. They are larger! The lowest visibility was on the Skyscrapers (Both normal and wide). The reason for this is most likely that that they are often on the right hand side of the page and the user either needs to scroll down or scroll right to see the advertisement.
Table 2 – Ad Visibility Rates by Format
Summary
The study clearly demonstrates that online advertisers in Western Europe are likely to be experiencing huge amounts of wastage in their online media spend. Facilitate Digital’s CVD reporting provides detailed insight into where this wastage is occurring so that steps can be taken to extract more ROI from your online activity. To learn more, please contact us now.
Contact
Timothy Whitfield
Global Director of Technical Innovation
Tel: +46 8-519 708 87
Email: timothy.whitfield@facilitatedigital.com