According to ComScore‘s latest benchmarks, the majority of ads that are served online in Canada don’t reach their intended audience, either because they’re shown to the wrong audience or they’re out of view.
The measurement provider found that of all the Canadian impressions it tracked in Q3 of last year, 45.7% reached someone who was in its advertiser’s target audience. A slightly higher percentage, 47.5%, were in view, according to the industry-standard definition of viewability.
Canada’s in-target rate is slightly higher than what ComScore measured for global markets, which ranged from 37% in Latin America to 44% in EMEA. It was also up three points from ComScore’s 2013 benchmark.
It’s not news that Canada’s overall viewability rate is below 50% — globally, viewability rates have been stagnant for some time, and most measurers have pegged them between 45-50% — but there’s been a lot less focus on in-target rates, which asses how efficiently brand advertisers are able to reach their desired audiences online.
So… how bad is it?
Although most marketers won’t be happy to hear that less than half their ads are reaching the audience they want, ComScore Canada president Brent Bernie said that it’s difficult to say whether 47.5% should be considered “low,” because it’s all relative to the size of the audience a particular advertiser is trying to hit.
For an ad targeting a broad group like males 18+, it would be disappointing if only 47% of your ads fell in-target. But for an ad targeting a much smaller niche audience, making up, say, 20% of the population, 47% is quite high. ComScore’s overall rate encompasses all campaigns, aiming for broad and narrow targets, even though the latter have a much harder time hitting their audience, and are naturally less efficient.
It’s also difficult to contextualize the overall in-target rate because there’s no comparable benchmark in conventional channels. “In other media, there’s a tremendous amount of ads that don’t hit their target,” Bernie said. But although most of us have experienced a TV or magazine ad that wasn’t targeted at us, it’s much harder to say how often that happens than it is in digital media, where everything’s measurable. “It would be really interesting to see if some of the other industries would release that kind of information, if they even have it,” he added.
Bernie also noted that the bulk of Canada’s online ads are bought directly from publishers, without advanced targeting tools. That means they’re relying on publishers’ audience forecasts, which aren’t different in principle from projected TV ratings.
In that environment, getting a low in-target rate on a campaign “could be as simple as [believing] you were putting your ads on a publisher that had a high composition of 18-34 year olds, and it turned out that it wasn’t as high,” said Bernie. “Or it might turn out that the overall composition was good, but the section it ran in was not as good.”
Behind the overall rate, he said there’s a lot of variability in how well Canadian advertisers are able to reach their audiences. But one thing he has learned is that those who have attained consistently higher rates are the ones who’ve worked harder at it.
“We certainly have seen some clients that have been able to move well above those averages by working with their agencies and publisher partners, but it takes work. It’s not going to just happen,” he said.
He said that he’s seen similar variance in viewability rates, with some advertisers scoring 70% or more. “Those are people who have been working with this concept and this capability for more than a couple years,” he said. “They’ve done more than the initial learning and are now adapting it into their business, unlike others who are now just coming to this discussion.”
