• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 21, 2012

Advertisers struggle with an inability to verify viewable ad impressions and the length of time the ad remained in view. DoubleVerify on Tuesday will release AdView to help brands monitor and track counted-as-delivered ad impressions that are never seen on publisher sites.

The AdView tool measures the duration of the ad exposure in multiple increments of five seconds to gain a complete analysis of the data that impacts campaigns. An ad is considered "viewed" only if at least 50% of the ad has been rendered within a user’s browser for at least one second, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) guidelines.

There have been numerous articles published on viewable ad impressions. One in particular tries to answer the "status of the viewable impression pilots" through the 3MS initiative.

Ad agencies and their clients want clearer ad impression information to determine the impact on the campaign and the budget, according to Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify. "Sometimes, the ad gets served in the bottom of the screen and isn't viewable, yet the advertiser gets charged for it," he said. "When advertisers and agencies measure the success of campaigns, they make assumptions that the ad got viewed, but they're not."

Publishers that understand the highest viewable ad position on a Web site page can charge higher CPMs, Netzer said.

For the past few months, Universal McCann and others have been testing the tool. For a duration of more than one second, the highest-performing sellers of media had a viewable ad rate of 83%, while the lowest was 28%. The top-performing sellers of media had average viewable rate of 75%, while the low-performing had an average of 40%. For all media sellers, the average ad viewable rates fell with time.

Some 54% of the ads delivered were viewed for at least one second, followed by 43% for at least three seconds, 36% for five seconds, 27% for 10 seconds, and 12% for 30 seconds or more.

Netzer said developing the product required overcoming numerous challenges, such as several Web browsers and tabs open on a desktop simultaneously, laptops hooked into more than one monitor and resizing windows.