Whitepaper Tests Viewability’s Impact on Ad Performance
Philadelphia, PA – Goodway Group, a managed services programmatic media firm serving hundreds of advertising agencies and marketers across North America, has released a whitepaper titled “Applying Viewability Intelligently for Measurably Improved Performance.” The report showcases the results of an exhaustive study that analyzed more than one billion delivered impressions to understand viewability’s true impact on campaign performance, and also the importance of viewability within the many factors affecting digital media campaign results.
The research study identified four key findings:
- Using two viewability technology companies, Goodway determined that users who are served ads that are measured as viewable convert at an 8-9% greater rate than users who are served ads that are not measured as viewable.
- A large gray area exists in viewability: impressions that are measured as being in-view for some amount of time but not enough to meet the IAB standard.
- Contrary to intuition, sites that have nearly 100% viewable inventory are the worst-performing sites in the programmatic ecosystem.
- Viewability’s lift on performance cannot be compared with other dimensions’ lift, such as behavioral data or site/context. Viewability is instead foundational to enabling all other performance to catalyze a campaign.
“When analyzing viewability, we came to some interesting findings that mostly have to do with the complexities that are built into our industry,” explained Jay Friedman, COO of Goodway Group. “Viewability has become a buzzword and a default for marketers, but we found that when campaigns are built solely around viewability, they often miss the mark to the detriment of advertisers. For example, our data shows that 100% viewability doesn’t automatically lead to conversions. It’s more nuanced than that. The programmatic ecosystem requires that multiple factors, including viewability, are considered to achieve optimal campaign results.”
The report calls out inconsistencies among viewability measurement companies, various paths to conversion and unethical industry practices such as “cookie-bombing” as all contributing to the current distorted understanding of viewability and its effect on campaigns.
To help marketers apply the findings, the report provides some guidance including adopting a multi-dimensional approach when executing campaigns and not focusing too much on any one specific area, concentrating on good creative and placing it in effective media vehicles, accepting a margin of error when it comes to viewability and cherry-picking viewable inventory in the private marketplace.
To address additional questions on the whitepaper and viewability, Goodway Group is hosting a live Tweet up on Friday, May 13 from 1PM – 3PM ET. Questions can be submitted via Twitter by using the #GGTweetUp hashtag.
For more information, Goodway Group’s whitepaper can be downloaded here.
About Goodway Group
Goodway Group is a leading managed-services programmatic partner to local, regional and Fortune 500 brand agencies. Bootstrapped and 100 percent privately owned since 1929, Goodway moved into the programmatic digital media space in 2006 to continue its rich history of tackling complex local and regional campaign executions with data science-driven targeting and support services to make achieving success easy for agency clients. Its proprietary algorithms pair with a technology-agnostic approach to enable agencies and marketers to achieve their ultimate goal – better results while remaining lean and nimble.
