EXCLUSIVE: Online publishers are set to face a barrage of pressure and possibly tens of millions in make-goods with the release of a new online ad serving application which “empirically proves” about 30% of all online display ad impressions are not seen by users.
Advertisers are still paying for them because their ads appear on a page on which a user has clicked. The problem for advertisers is users often do not view the entire page or go ‘beneath-the-fold’. Ads that sit beneath the screen view will go unsighted but are still counted as an advertising impression.
Australian-listed ad tech player, Facilitate Digital, which has former Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon on its board, released its software last September into 10 European markets and the results are disturbing: nearly a third of all ad impressions on websites are not seen by users.
In Germany, where Facilitate is the leading online ad serving provider, advertisers have demanded make-goods from online publishers or are refusing to pay for the full cost of the impressions they have booked.
“No one is going to buy a TV schedule and accept 30% of it was never broadcast,” Facilitate Digital chief executive Ian Lowe told AdNews. “It does create complexity for the industry in terms of how we manage this but in the end it is a very significant issue that is of critical importance to advertisers. Publishers obviously don’t like this because it creates more complexity for them. That’s understandable but ultimately what they have to care about is that advertisers, not just their agencies, hate this.”
Facilitate’s ad serving module, dubbed Creative and Visibility Durability (CVD), uses its ad servers to send a pulse every second to websites which captures where on the page a user is viewing. The pageview pulse is linked directly to specific ad campaigns so an advertiser can determine how many impressions, which they have booked and paid for, have had the opportunity to be seen.
Lowe said Australia-specific data on the problem would be released next month but preliminary numbers show it will be similar to Facilitate’s European experience.
This article first appeared in the 5 April 2012 edition of
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