The viewability of ads on a website is a critical factor in determining the success of advertising campaigns. In a highly competitive environment where users often ignore standard ad formats, ensuring that ads are noticed and attract attention is a priority for both advertisers and publishers. In this article, we will discuss why the viewability of ads is so important, which will help you understand what tools you may need to improve this metric. We recommend paying attention to Teqblaze, a reliable provider of white-label mobile SDK, SSP, DSP, and other solutions for launching quality marketing campaigns.
What Is Ad Viewability?
Ad Viewability is a metric that measures the visibility of a banner, video, or any other advertising content to a user. The metric lets you know whether a website or mobile app visitor saw the ad that was intended for them.
Ad Viewability is used to separate visible ad impressions, for which ad networks are rewarded, from regular impressions. It is worth explaining the difference between a technical impression and a viewable impression:
- A technical impression can be counted if the ad was loaded on a page or in an application but was not necessarily visible to the user.
- A viewable impression, unlike a technical impression, is counted if the ad was actually displayed on the user’s screen and could be seen.
Why Is It Important to Monitor Ad Viewability?
It is no secret that ad networks pay publishers only for visible ad impressions, and there are obvious reasons for this. Advertisers want ads to work and bring results: people click on ads, buy products or services, or, at a minimum, simply pay attention to the ad content. This is why ad viewability comes to the fore.
Ad Viewability allows you to separate quality impressions that can lead to conversion actions from useless ones. The higher the ad viewability on a site, the more attractive the site is for advertisers. After all, you must admit that no company or business wants to pay for impressions that do not bring leads, customers, or views.
At the same time, regular ad views can also be important. For example, registrations or adding products to the cart, if the goal of the advertising campaign is to increase brand awareness. People buy from companies they already know and trust.
In 2024, advertisers aim to place ads on websites with a viewability rate of 70% or higher. In this case, companies can be sure that their budget will not be wasted. At the same time, websites with an Ad Viewability rate below 50% risk being blacklisted by advertisers.
Reasons Why a User Does Not See an Ad On a Website
So, we figured out why it is important to monitor the Viewability of a website. Now let’s talk about the reasons why the ad visibility rate may decrease:
- The ad may simply not have time to load. The user will scroll past it or leave the page.
- The creative may be out of the user’s visibility zone. For example, when the page scale changes, or if the ad player is partially visible.
- The browser may not have the necessary plugins for the correct display and playback of the ad.
- The ad may be loaded on the page, but the user simply does not scroll to it.
How to Increase The Visibility of Ads On Your Website?
Here are a few steps every web publisher can take:
- Test different ad placements and sizes.
Try placing ad units in different places on the web page. Run A/B tests to see which option works best for you.
Remember that vertical ad units are usually more noticeable on the page than horizontal ones. Due to their greater height, such ads stay in the visible area of the screen longer. Vertical creative content looks especially advantageous on mobile devices.
- Increase page loading speed.
Make sure your site loads quickly even for users with slow internet. Fortunately, there are several ways to do this:
- Make images lighter. Use services that allow you to reduce the size of images without losing quality.
- Use caching. Since your site’s cookies are stored in the user’s browser cache, the pages will load much faster when they return to the site.
- Optimize the page code. Remove unnecessary characters and spaces from the code, thereby reducing its size. This can slightly increase the page loading speed.
- Use lazy loading of content. Show content and ads only when they are visible to the user. This will help increase the number of visible ad impressions.
- Use asynchronous loading of ads. Using API and ad tags allows you to load ads in parallel with the rest of the page content, which increases the loading speed of the site.
- Optimize the site for mobile devices.
As the share of mobile traffic continues to grow, it is important to pay attention to the mobile version of the site. Here are some tips to help increase the visibility of mobile ads:
- Make sure your site has a responsive design that automatically adjusts to different screen sizes of mobile devices.
- Optimize the loading speed of the mobile version of the site. Slow loading can scare away visitors and reduce the visibility of ads.
- Add a 300×250 ad unit to the mobile version of the site. Due to its compact size, such a block fits perfectly into sidebars, content blocks, and other areas of the page. The 300×250 size fits almost all mobile device screens and has excellent visibility.
Final Thoughts
To increase the visibility of ads on the site, it is necessary to consider many factors: from the correct placement and formats of ads to deep personalization of content and the use of programmatic technologies. If you want to learn more about modern tools for high-quality marketing campaigns, such as WL mobile SDK, SSP, and DSP, we recommend paying attention to Teqblaze. The company provides various ad tech solutions, including SSP, DSP, and mobile software development kit under the white label model.