An Empirical Study on Display Ad Impression Viewability Measurements
This addresses the issue of fraud ad impressions for advertisers and publishers, but it is incremental as it refines existing measurement criteria rather than introducing a new paradigm.
The study tackled the problem of inaccurate ad impression counting in display advertising by investigating various viewability measurements based on pixel percentage and exposure time, finding that counting an impression when over 75% of ad pixels are exposed for at least 2 continuous seconds provides the most accurate measurement.
Display advertising normally charges advertisers for every single ad impression. Specifically, if an ad in a webpage has been loaded in the browser, an ad impression is counted. However, due to the position and size of the ad slot, lots of ads are actually not viewed but still measured as impressions and charged. These fraud ad impressions indeed undermine the efficacy of display advertising. A perfect ad impression viewability measurement should match what the user has really viewed with a short memory. In this paper, we conduct extensive investigations on display ad impression viewability measurements on dimensions of ad creative displayed pixel percentage and exposure time to find which measurement provides the most accurate ad impression counting. The empirical results show that the most accurate measurement counts one ad impression if more than 75% of the ad creative pixels have been exposed for at least 2 continuous seconds.