Report: Australian ad viewability remains below global par

A new report has found more than half of Australia’s digital ad inventory remained unviewed even as pressure mounts on how to improve viewability across the industry.

The new report produced by Integral Ad Science reported 49.3 per cent of display ads are viewability based on the definition outlined by the US Media Ratings Council (MRC). This is based on at least 50 per cent of the ad pixels are visible for one continuous second or more. There was also a marked difference across the way ads were generated, with viewability at 48.2 per cent for programmatic, and 64.3 per cent for publisher direct.

While the local figures are an improvement on previous years, they remain well behind the rest of the world, including the US (53.6 per cent), UK (57.4 per cent), Germany (61.1 per cent) and France (61.6 per cent).

In addition, the report found six out of 10 video ads are also out of view globally. General and sophisticated invalid traffic sat at 5.2 per cent in Australia.

There was a dip however, in very high brand risk inventory, by 0.5 per cent for direct placements. Again, Australia is seeing higher brand risk than other markets at 12.7 per cent, compared to 9.5 per cent in the US in 7.8 per cent in the UK.

According to the report, ads that are vertically oriented tend to have higher levels of viewability. For instance, while overall global display viewability per the MRC standard was 53.6 per cent, vertical ads such as half-page, skyscraper and portraits, averaged more than 60 per cent viewability.

While there’s clearly a way to go, IAS MD for A/NZ, James Diamond, took somewhat of an optimistic view of the results, saying improvements across the board indicated that viewability was becoming increasingly important to organisations in Australia.

“For many brands, results can be considerably more effective if ads appear for longer durations and our data shows the extent to which viewability declines as you look further into time exposure,” he commented. “While 49.3 per cent of ads are viewable for one second, it falls to 34.7 seconds for five seconds and 22.1 per cent for 15 seconds.”

The report was based on analysing billions of display and video impressions over the first half of 2016.

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