“Does a fallen tree in the woods make a sound if no one is there to hear it?” is an age-old question. People have used this question as a metaphor for the idea that certain ideas and thoughts are not entertained by the broader public because they are never heard. It is a shorthand way of explaining the complex concept of the importance of being noticed and understood. This is where advertising viewability comes into play.
This concept certainly holds water when it comes to the marketing and advertising industries. Advertisements released with little or no notice don’t tend to perform well or serve their intended purpose. This is why we must look at the importance of increasing advertising viewability on digital media websites.
Understanding Display Advertising Viewability
There is a specific definition of display advertising viewability that comes from Google which may be helpful to understand:
An ad is counted as viewable if at least 50% of its area is visible for at least 1 second for display ads, or at least 2 seconds for video ads. It can help you understand how often your ad appeared where people could notice it.
The logical conclusion that most come to is the fact that they should certainly at least review their advertising viewability numbers from time to time to better understand where they stand with things. Knowing how often people are even able to see the materials that they put out is a helpful way to revamp an entire marketing campaign as needed.
Assessing Current Viewability
Knowing how frequently your ads are currently being viewed is a step in the right direction toward understanding the value of the marketing campaigns that you are conducting in the first place. It is only when one takes the time to learn about this vital statistic that one can determine what changes (if any) one needs to make to their advertising campaign to obtain better results.
It is critical to understand that the current advertising viewability rates will reflect the statistics as measured by Active View. This system helps you best understand if your ads appear on the screen long enough for users to view them. However, there is no guarantee that a particular user is currently looking at the screen when your ad appears there. Take the numbers that you receive with a small grain of salt given that it is impossible to know if someone is viewing their screen when your ad appears.
Optimizing Ad Placement
The specific part of a web page that your ad appears on will have an impact on the likelihood that a particular user sees it at all. It is your responsibility to make sure you work on optimizing ad placement. This way, you can have as many eyeballs on your ads as possible. A few tips for how to best place your ad include:
Consider Your Users
What kind of people are you serving ads to in the first place? You need to think about those individuals and how they can navigate around your site with ease. If this is something that they struggle with, then consider reconfiguring your website to make it easier to get around.
Choose Advanced Ad Formats
The standard banner ad doesn’t cut it for many online advertisers anymore. They need to go with something more advanced and more interesting to look at. When you select an advanced ad format, you can get more eyes on your ad than you would have otherwise. You can also generate the kind of positive attention that you would like to have for those ads.
Review the Most Engaging Parts of Your Website
You can pull up a heat map of the areas users tend to click on when they visit your website. If you do so, you will see which areas of your website are the most engaging for your visitors. Those are the areas where you want to place your ads. After all, those areas are clearly where people gravitate to.
Creating ideal ads often has just as much to do with where you put the ads as with what kind of content they contain. Keep that in mind as you begin your quest to create the best possible advertisement.
Improving Ad Loading Speed
A 2019 survey performed by Unbounce found that 70% of consumers admitted that they made some online purchasing decisions based on the loading speed of the website they visited. In other words, a slow-loading website might cause some would-be consumers to decide that they would rather not deal with it at all and instead move on to another website to make their purchase.
There is a concept known as “lazy loading”. This allows one to optimize the speed at which their web page loads. It only loads the section of the website that the user happens to be on at that time. This is superior to loading the entire website all at the same time because it requires less processing power to only load a portion of it.
Therefore, it is possible for ads to be served up on a faster-loading website. This makes the ads more likely to be viewed because users aren’t necessarily bouncing off the site as quickly as they otherwise might.
In online advertising, load speed is everything. Users expect to receive all of the information and products that they want the moment that they want them. If your advertisements take a significant period to load, you can expect that users will either ignore them outright or will move on to another website where things are moving more smoothly. Either outcome is less than desirable for you. You must think about ad loading speeds as one of your top priorities when working on a new marketing campaign.
Implementing Responsive Design
The concept of responsive design is a broad one and can mean a lot of things. One of the ways that it impacts your advertising visibility is in how easy it is to use your website in the first place. If it is laid out nicely and users are easily able to tell where they should navigate, then your ads will be highly viewable. However, if you have done a shoddy job of creating a usable website, then the ads are going to seem like nothing more than background noise. Keep that in mind as you lay out your website section by section.
Implementing Ad Fraud Prevention Measures
One of the worst things that can happen to you as a marketer is to have false information presented in the statistics that you see about your advertisements. This makes it important for all online advertisers to use ad fraud prevention measures. These measures help keep out inaccurate information related to the success of their ads.
Datadome explains what ad fraud might look like:
Ad fraud involves falsifying the number of times an online advertisement is clicked on or displayed. As clicks increase, the advertiser’s revenue increases and the publisher is rewarded with an advertising fee. This type of fraud can be perpetuated by competitors or fraudulent publishers using automated bot traffic to click on ads.
Knowing that this exists means that you must take measures to prevent it whenever possible. You should use ad fraud detection tools to identify if this is a problem with your ads and root out the bad actors.
You might ask yourself why ad fraud prevention matters when it comes to overall advertising viewability. There are several ways that fraudsters might impact the viewability of your ad whenever they wish to do so. A few of the ways that they may do so include:
Creating Invisible or Hidden Ads
Some fraudsters will use a technique that causes your ad to be completely invisible or hidden on the website where you have attempted to place it. However, it will still log the impression. Therefore, it will appear as though you have more impressions than you really do, but the viewability of your ad will be completely gone.
Domain Spoofing
Sophisticated fraudsters will sometimes use domain spoofing techniques. These can make a website they create appear like a much more popular website. Then, you pay to have your ads placed on a fake website, and your advertising viewability becomes negated because people are not traveling to the fake website but to the real one instead.
Click Injection
Fake clicks on your ads are a real problem. Those fake clicks often come from criminals who are attempting to manipulate the system. Understand that click injection is a major problem and can lead to the appearance that your ads are performing better than they truly are.
These are just a few of the ways that ad fraud can take your advertising viewability down a notch. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Keep this in mind when you begin crafting your next big ad campaign.
Utilizing Ad Blocking Detection and Mitigation
As of 2019, the number of ad block users stood at 763 million. People don’t like to see advertisements online if they don’t have to. This is why you must take mitigation efforts to get around this when possible.
Ad block mitigation tools identify active ad blockers and work on creating other ways that the ads can still be served to that audience. They don’t always work and some ads may be ignored regardless. However, advertisers must do everything that they can to still attempt to get their advertisement out to the users that have installed ad-block tools when possible. They are too large of an audience to ignore.
Testing and Optimization
Don’t forget to test your online advertisements after you have created them. One popular way to do this is to use the A/B testing model. This is a helpful way to determine which style of ads is likely to be the most effective. It involves showing two slightly different ads to users and then waiting to see which version users click on more. This allows you to easily determine which style of ad users are more responsive to. There are a huge number of things you can do to improve your advertising viewability on digital media websites. At Ndevr, we can show you how to get the most out of every dollar you spend on digital ads. You need top-notch results, and we can show you how to get them. Contact us today!
