Report Showcases the Impact of Fraud, Viewability, Page Clutter, Ad Collisions and Other Variables on Advertising Effectiveness
NEW YORK, NY – Integral Ad Science, the leading global provider of actionable advertising intelligence for buyers and sellers of digital media, today announced the results of its Q1-Q2 2013 Semiannual Review, which represents key findings on media quality themes across the digital advertising industry. This year’s Semiannual Review includes insights around issues never before seen in previous reports, such as page clutter and video fraud. The results highlight year-over-year improvements in media quality, with ad viewability increasing by as much as five percent, and fraud decreasing by as much as 10 percent as compared to previous reports.
The Q1-Q2 2013 Semiannual Review results showcased industry-wide improvements in ad viewability. Specifically:
- 61 percent of directly placed ads are in view for at least one second.
- Viewability also improved across networks (43 percent) and exchanges (40 percent).
Despite the overall improvements, in real time bidding environments 37 percent of bids were made on sites with less than 20 percent of ads in view by a human. This indicates that pre-bid insights on media quality are essential, especially when display and video ad fraud mimics high performing, viewable impressions. To combat this issue, in spring 2013, Integral Ad Science released the industry’s first pre-bid fraud detection solution, an add-on to its Suspicious Activity Detection product for both the buy and sell side that scores web pages to determine the risk of fraudulent or deceptive activity, and proactively blocks ads in real time, before they appear on fraudulent pages.
The Q1-Q2 Semiannual Review showed a significant decrease in fraudulent activity. Specifically:
- Fraud levels dropped from 30 percent of impressions to 20 percent across the exchanges.
- Only two percent of impressions were fraudulent across directly placed ads.
- In analyzing pre-bid impressions, Integral found that 22 percent of bid requests were made on sites exhibiting fraud, so again, pre-bid insights combined with real-time action is the most effective way to prevent fraud.
The Q1-Q2 2013 Semiannual Review again included holistic media quality analysis derived from Integral Ad Science’s TRAQ score. TRAQ helps both buyers and sellers value media more effectively based on a number of environmental and exposure factors, including brand safety, page content and structure, ad viewability, share of view, ad clutter, ad collisions, and likelihood of fraudulent or suspicious activity. Results showed that ad placements bought directly from publishers had the highest average TRAQ score of 719 out of a possible 1,000. Networks, exchanges and hybrids each showed year-over-year improvements in average quality, with TRAQ scores of 605, 586 and 597, respectively.
Additional findings showed:
- Shopping sites had the highest average TRAQ score and the lowest risk of fraudulent activity.
- 13 percent of ads collided with another ad from the same campaign; 9.1 percent of the time collisions occurred with one other ad, while collisions with two other ads occurred 2.2 percent and collisions with three or more ads occurred 1.6 percent of the time.
- Although directly placed ads appeared in primarily uncluttered environments (86 percent of impressions on pages with 1-3 ads), more than half of impressions across networks, exchanges and hybrids appeared alongside three or more ads.
- Three percent of pre-roll video ad impressions are suspicious of being fraudulent.
- 40 percent of in-banner video ad impressions via exchanges are suspicious of being fraudulent.
“As our report indicates, ad buyers and sellers cannot effectively improve issues like low viewability and fraud, especially across exchanges, unless they leverage key actionable information about media quality before they bid,” said Scott Knoll, CEO of Integral. “The more we as an industry can use data science to uncover and eliminate poor quality impressions in real time, the closer we can get to truly understanding which ads have a causal impact on performance, ultimately leading to less waste and unprecedented ROI.”
To view the complete results, visit: http://integralads.com/sites/default/files/Integral_SemiannualReview_2013_Q1-Q2.pdf.
About Integral Ad Science
Integral Ad Science is a technology company focused on ensuring safe, quality media environments for online advertisers. Employing the industry’s only media valuation platform, Integral Ad Science evaluates the media environment and establishes a TRAQ Score (True Advertising Quality), a first-of-its kind, quantifiable measure of media quality that ultimately benefits every media buyer, seller, publisher and trading platform. TRAQ score supports an advertisers’ ability to plan, execute and target their audience in an environment that reflects their brand image and drives ROI, while simultaneously setting benchmarks for publishers who wish to improve the quality of their content and design to attract premium advertisers. Integral is headquartered in New York with operations in San Francisco, London, Tokyo and Sydney. Learn more at www.integralads.com.
