Tips for Improving Your Ad Placement Performance

To make your inventory more competitive and increase your revenue, publishers must pay attention to key performance metrics - Viewability Rate, VVR, and CTR.

Definitions:

Viewability Rate is the percent of impressions that were viewable to a user. An ad is considered viewable after being at least 50% in view for 2 consecutive seconds, as defined by the IAB.

Video view rate (VVR) is the rate at which users are watching your silent autoplay video ads. (Example: if a your silent autoplay video placement receives 1000 impressions, and 150 users viewed it for at least 10 seconds, the VVR on the placement is 15%.)

Viewability Rate and VVR are directly correlated, as video placements that are more viewable are more likely to be watched by the user, and will therefore experience a higher VVR.

Click-through Rate (CTR) is also very important to buyers, as it represents the percent of impressions that were clicked on by the user. Like VVR, CTR is also closely tied to Viewability Rate, as the more viewable an ad is, the more opportunity there is for a click to occur. If an ad is barley viewable, the chance of a click occurring is very low.

Why are these metrics so important?

From a programmatic perspective, buyers are more likely to bid (and will bid higher) on placements that have higher viewability and stronger performance. In the case of a direct sold campaign, advertisers are more likely to pursue more native campaign opportunities if the publisher has a history of high viewability and performance.

Tips for Improving Viewability and Performance:

Are your placements experiencing lower-than-optimal viewability, VVR, or CTR? Here are some tips to help you improve it:

• In-feed location: If your placement sits low in your feed, we recommend moving it higher. The less a user has to scroll to be exposed to the content, the more likely they are to view the ad or click-through to the advertiser content.
• Post positioning: is your placement located below a post? We recommend moving it to a mid-post position to drive views.
• Below or above fold: we always recommend that placements appear above the fold whenever possible. Increase your Viewability and performance on below-fold placements by moving them to a more premium position above the fold.
• Blacklist brands or creatives: use SFP’s creative insights tools to see which creatives are driving low performance, and blacklist those brands or creatives. In some cases, it simply comes down to providing users with creatives that will interest them enough to click-through the ad or watch the video to completion.