What is Ad Viewability and How Does it Impact Your Revenue?

1. What is Ad Viewability?

Ad viewability is a metric used in digital advertising to measure how visible the ads are on the publisher’s website to users. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) standard, for an ad to count as ‘viewed’, 50% of it must be visible to a user for at least 1 second. For video ads, 50% of the ad must be visible for at least 2 seconds. Google refers to viewable impressions as ‘Active View‘.

2. Measure impressions with viewability

Viewability helps publishers determine whether an ad shown on a page was actually seen, or viewable, by a user. To measure ad viewability, you have to find the total viewable ad impressions served and divide by total ad impressions served.

3. Why is Viewability Important?

Advertisers and brand marketers want to make sure their ads are viewable as ads with high viewability generate a better return on investment for their campaigns. So, they are also willing to pay a lot more to win quality ad placements. Viewability directly affects the value and quality of the publisher’s ad inventory.

So that it's critical for publishers to understand how to optimize for better viewable impressions on their websites, blogs…

4. How to improve viewability?

Netlink suggests some strategies and solutions as follows:

- Page length and quality of your content: according to Google, factors having the most significant influence on your ad viewability rates are the ad size: the shorter content, the higher viewability rates it has. Also, do not forget to focus on creating attractive content that is engaging enough visitors.

- Ad placement, size and formats: each placement, size and format of an ad bring different effects for publishers. There are top-performing ad sizes and formats that are generally used by most advertisers and have the potential to increase revenue for publishers.

Take a look at an Ad format worth trying to increase your revenue. and an article on how to optimize ad size and placements.

- Load speed: Slow-loading web pages and mobile sites lead to poor user experience and high bounce rates. Publishers can make several technical adjustments for speed optimization, including enabling file compression, reducing redirects, and optimizing images to improve server response time. This will ultimately lead to increased total impressions.

- Ad refresh: Ad refresh allows reloading ads if they are in view for some time. This will guarantee that the new ad will be visible immediately after rendering it. Also, this will increase your ad placement’s viewability score in your ad server and get more ad impressions, thus increasing ad revenue. Google recommended that publishers have ads persist for 60 seconds or longer, depending on the functionality of their apps.