By
Alexandra Northington
In
an earlier
post, the author explained how the definition of viewability, a metric in
online advertising, is changing and why it matters for digital news. Here, she
explains how this is changing the way sites deliver ads to visitors.
How
are publishers responding to the Media Rating Council's (MRC) viewability
certification?
Over
the past year or so, many publishers have taken steps to better understand and
to improve their site’s viewability—a process that typically starts with at
least one (often several) of the MRC’s dozen or so accredited vendors running
viewability measurements on their site. Although results from these tests tend
to vary from vendor to vendor (we’ll talk more about that in a bit), these
tests have given publishers the opportunity to not only challenge preconceived
notions about the value of certain ad placements, but also to make changes to
their sites to optimize for viewability.
According
to a recent AdMonsters report, 74 percent of the 50 major publishers
they surveyed had completed viewability vendor testing. Of that group, 46
percent have already made adjustments to improve viewability, such as
repositioning ads, removing ads, and implementing “just-in-time” ad serving to
reduce load time. Many larger publishers, including Yahoo! and The Washington
Post, have taken the new viewability standard as an opportunity to rethink site
design on a large scale, revamping sites with cleaner, more fluid user
experiences with fewer, larger ad formats.
Particularly
among premium publishers, we’ve seen new site designs that are beginning to
shift focus away from leaderboards and mid-page ad units (MPUs) and move toward
more responsive ad placements that better blend with editorial formats. A few
major news sites, including LATimes.com, NBCNews.com, and Time.com have also
incorporated streaming content features such as continuous scrolling, where
readers have a clickless transition from one article to the next, and don’t
have to wait for a new page to load.
In
other words, these publishers are making changes that not only increase
viewability, but also improve overall user experience. The Los Angeles Times,
for example, aimed to “eradicate print-centric and antiquated web concepts,
such as ‘the fold,’ ‘the jump,’ ‘endless clicking,’ and ‘the dead end’...and
seamlessly path readers from one piece of content to the next,” with their May redesign. In doing so, they—alongside Time.com and The
Daily Beast—are creating an experience that increases the amount of time
visitors spend on their site, and in effect, boosts the likelihood of consumers
engaging with their content and the surrounding ads—a win for publishers,
marketers, and consumers.
On
the other hand, some publishers’ efforts to protect ad revenue have come at the
cost of consumer experience. Think additional ads, pop-ups, page
takeovers, and full-page interstitials.
Along
with changes to site design and user experience, viewability is also forcing
publishers to rethink pricing and yield management models. Be on the lookout
for a demand-side vs. supply-side rundown later in our blog series.
How
are publishers using viewability to their advantage?
As
I mentioned in our first post, the new viewability standard could be very
beneficial to publishers—especially those producing premium content. Let’s
break it down:
·
Premium content is more likely to grab, and most
importantly, maintain, a reader’s attention. In theory, a highly engaged
audience will deliver better campaign performance for marketers. Read: If the
audience is engaging with content while an ad is in view, they're more likely
to meet and surpass the one-second viewability requirement. Better performance
will then increase demand for those ad placements, thus making ads integrated
with premium content more valuable.
·
As Jason Kint, now CEO of the Online Publisher’s
Association, recently pointed out, viewability “aligns the monetization of websites
more closely with the consumption of sites. The more marketers’ dollars line up
with share of consumers’ time the better off content companies will be.”
·
As ad spend shifts away from traditional media
like TV, new advertising money is being allocated to digital. Viewability will
offer, at least on some level, a more consistent system of attribution across
media channels. As a result, we will most likely see digital media included in
brand allocations more frequently. Thus, as media planners build out cross-channel
campaigns and begin to trade programmatically, digital content that can deliver
high viewability and prove measurable engagement will stand to benefit.
What
challenges are publishers facing during this transition?
Although
viewability is widely considered a step in the right direction for the industry
as a whole, this progress doesn’t come without a number of challenges for
publishers. Many of these challenges are due to the fact that viewable
impressions are not predictable. Rather, they are a function of page placement,
content makeup, and consumer behavior—a combination of moving parts that
inevitably leads to a wide spectrum of viewability patterns.
Moreover,
we have to take into account that an impression being viewable is binary. It’s
either viewable, or it’s not. And if it’s not, it does not have value.
Viewability, as it currently stands, offers a one-dimensional view of a much
larger, more complex equation for evaluating the value and effectiveness of a
campaign.
Unfortunately,
this leaves the door open for low quality sites to exploit the system. Some
sites will choose to maximize their number of viewable impressions through
general bad behavior (pages covered in ads, poor quality, click-bait content,
disruptive reading experiences), and in effect, decrease the value of
viewability. While this behavior may not be sustainable—over time, high quality
content that earns reader engagement will win out—in the short term it may
create pricing obstacles for premium publishers.
Another
big challenge for publishers is lack of consistency in viewability
measurements. Many publishers have found that their viewability percentage
varies, sometimes drastically, from vendor to vendor. On a positive note, the
MRC lifting its advisory will push companies that were quick to hop on the
viewability measurement train to address core technical problems in order to
come into modern compliance with the council’s hard standards.
The
thing is, measuring viewability is a complex challenge. (I’ve saved the
technical details as for why that is for a later post.) Even with the MRC’s
guidelines and accreditation process, which has drastically improved accuracy
and standardized how vendors measure viewability, publishers will certainly
face a number obstacles in the short term.
One
very real hurdle among the many is that publishers may not get paid for
impressions that an agency’s vendor reports as non-viewable, even if another
vendor, has identified the ads as legitimate and running in view.
Long
story short, viewability is a work in progress. But we are moving in the right
direction.
Alexandra
Northington is a writer for Chartbeat.
This
post was originally published on Data-Fueled Thinking and Making a blog from Chartbeat, a
startup that gives more than 5,000 publishers real-time data about how people
are engaging with their content. It is republished on IJNet with permission.
You can follow Chartbeat on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
Image
CC-licensed on Flickr via Tim Franklin Photography.
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