esbconnect’s Managing Director, Suzanna Chaplin, argues that display impressions can be a misleading measurement of true ad views when your audience can only see 50% of your ad.

Why ad viewability counts

Who is actually “seeing” your ads, and how “viewable” they really are, is much more important than advertisers often give credit to, but ad viewability is frequently overlooked in favour of sexier performance metrics like impressions.

What is a Viewability Rate and why doesn’t it work?

A viewability rate is the percentage of online ads actually seen by a user. This is the ratio of ads on a site at any one time which are deemed as actually “viewable”, since the user’s eye cannot take in all information at once. A “viewable” impression is described as being at least 50% of an ad’s pixels being visible on screen for minumum of one second. For example, if a website has 5 ad formats on screen in total, but 2 are “below the fold” (i.e. you need to scroll down the page to view them), only 3 are deemed “viewable” and the site will have a “Viewability Rate” of 60%.