Analyzing and testing viewability methods in an advertising network

Abstract

Many of the current online businesses base completely their revenue models in earnings from online advertisement. A problematic fact is that according to recent studies more than half of display ads are not being detected as viewable. The International Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined a viewable impression as an impression that at least 50% of its pixels are rendered in the viewport during at least one continuous second. Although there is agreement on this definition for measuring viewable impressions in the industry, there is no systematic methodologies on how it should be implemented or the trustworthiness of these methods. In fact, the Media Rating Council (MRC) announced that there are inconsistencies across multiple reports attempting to measure this metric. In order to understand the magnitude of the problem, we conduct an analysis of different methods to track viewable impressions. Then, we test a subset of geometric and strong interaction methods in a webpage registered in the worldwide ad-network ExoClick, which currently serves over 7 billion geo-targeted ads a day to a global network of 65000 web/mobile publisher platforms. We find that the Intersection Observer API is the method that detects more viewable impressions given its robustness towards the technological constraints that face the rest of implementations available. The motivation of this work is to better understand the limitations and advantages of such methods, which can have an impact at a standardisation level in online advertising industry, as well as to provide guidelines for future research based on the lessons learned.