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Share on XIt’s no secret that measurement is a crucial component of successful advertising campaigns. Advertisers and publishers alike have been measuring digital impressions for decades. But ad measurement has evolved significantly since its inception, and impressions aren’t the only metric that matter anymore.
So how comprehensive and actionable is the measurement you’re relying on today?
The right measurement tactics enable you to ensure greater brand protection and impact on valuable media inventory — especially in environments like the open web, where your display and video campaigns are highly visible. In this blog post, we’ll explore why end-to-end ad measurement is invaluable and how it can transform your advertising strategy.
The key ingredients of end-to-end ad measurement
Despite its simplicity in nature, end-to-end ad measurement on the open web can get complicated fast. The advertising ecosystem is complex and busy, with consumers tuning in every day to different formats via multiple streaming platforms, and often in very different contexts. To navigate this complexity, end-to-end measurement must cover several key areas.
Viewability
For advertising to make an impact, it has to be viewed —not just served. Ensuring that your digital ads have the opportunity to be seen by consumers, wherever they are, is critical. All digital ads — desktop, mobile, in-app, browser, display, video — have unique requirements that need to be met when measuring for viewability.
As advertising becomes more sophisticated, brands want to not only prove ROI but also transact on viewability, and that’s why it’s more important than ever to have full-flight data on whether or not an ad was seen. IAS provides coverage for display and video placements across desktop, mobile web, and mobile app, and provides actionable data that reports viewability, fraud, and overall user experience.
Measuring viewability is paramount, so IAS ensures it doesn’t come at the cost of efficiency. We deliver the same set of data to both buyers and sellers so that no time is wasted on reconciliation. Additionally, our predictive data makes it possible for brands to target the most viewable ads available, all before ever placing a bid. Our pre-bid video and display viewability segments are easily accessible within the world’s largest demand-side platforms.
Ad Fraud
There are more than 5.35 billion internet users worldwide using the internet everyday. But unfortunately, sometimes digital ads are delivered to anything but a real person.
Advertising fraud is a persistent threat in the digital space, draining resources and diminishing campaign effectiveness. According to our 19th Edition Media Quality Report, campaigns that are not optimized for fraud tended to encounter levels of fraud up to 14 times higher than those optimized against ad fraud. In fact, 8.4% of non-optimized ad campaign impressions were served to anything but a real human in the second half of 2023.
End-to-end ad fraud measurement can significantly increase transparency to help identify fraudulent inventory. By leveraging ad fraud metrics, marketers can measure the amount of activity their ads are generating from fraudsters, and subsequently use this data to optimize ad spend toward real users via IAS pre-bid solutions. Access to actionable invalid traffic data throughout the entire campaign is key to effectively allocating ad spend and confidently ensuring your ads have an opportunity to reach real users and make an impact.
Brand Safety and Suitability
Brand safety must go beyond the binary. Black and white brand safety and suitability measurement can unnecessarily limit scale and doesn’t give the context marketers need to understand the effectiveness of their ads.
That’s why it’s critical for marketers to build on the power of brand safety with the innovation of suitability. IAS contextual targeting technology reviews all elements on a given page and takes additional steps beyond URL analysis to understand the meaning of the content. Before a bid is even placed, IAS’s predictive science pre-screens pages to filter out content that isn’t suitable for a given brand. Only IAS gets to the true meaning of the content, so marketers can ensure they’re aligning campaigns with consumers who will connect the most with their brand.
End-to-end brand safety and suitability measurement and protection gives marketers the most accurate picture of the content near their ads, and provides brands with the opportunity to safeguard without limiting scale.
4 steps to improve your brand’s performance on the open web
- Leverage measurement partners who follow industry standards for viewability
- Keep up with benchmarks for viewability, invalid traffic, and brand safety and suitability
- Employ AI-powered prevention solutions for invalid traffic and brand safety and suitability to ensure your ads are seen by real people in the right context
- Reallocate ad spend based on viewability, invalid traffic, and brand safety and suitability data
Drive superior results today with IAS
By incorporating end-to-end measurement into your digital advertising strategy, you can protect your brand, optimize your ad spend, and achieve superior results. Reach out to an IAS representative today to learn how we can help you harness the full potential of your advertising campaigns.
