Updated August 11, 10 a.m.
Google‘s platforms aren’t the friendliest environment for third-party audience measurement, but it’s taken a big step forward with the completion of a deep ad server integration that will give advertisers native access to comScore’s campaign measurement for any ads they buy or serve using DoubleClick.
In a Q2 earnings call this morning, ComScore president and CEO Serge Matta revealed that the company’s partnership with Google, announced in Spring 2014, has reached its goal of integrating its core digital campaign measurement product, Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE), into Google’s ad server.
Quoted in a release, Matta said he’s “delighted that ComScore vCE in DoubleClick is now widely available to Google DoubleClick customers.”
The integration makes vCE’s GRP-based audience measurement available as a paid feature for advertisers using the DoubleClick for Advertisers (DfA) ad server and DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) programmatic demand-side platform. Other third party measurement options, like Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings, can be used to track performance on DBM, but comScore says it’s the first to be integrated at the ad server level.
According to a blogpost by DoubleClick, the integration is completely tagless, and works across both display and video ads. Publishers will also be able to use vCE to forecast reach on their sites.
Update: When reached for comment, ComScore said that vCE for DoubleClick is not currently available in Canada, but that there are plans for a global launch in the near future.
However, clients still don’t have a way to measure viewability and other verification metrics independently. Google has so far not given third-party viewability measurers access to its platforms, and focused instead on its internal Active View metric. The decision has sparked criticism about conflict of interest from marketers and led the Kellogg company to completely stop paid advertising on YouTube.
In its announcement, Google said that it was expanding Active View to incorporate average viewable time in addition to rate of viewability (the percentage of ads in a campaign that were at least 50% on-screen for 1 second in display and 2 seconds in video). By being able to see how long their ads remain in-view, advertisers will get significantly more information on how their campaigns are performing, especially advertisers that have been dissatisfied with the minimum duration of 1-2 seconds used by the IAB.
Correction: An earlier version of this story and its headline incorrectly stated that comScore’s vCE is the first audience measurement product available on DoubleClick. Several third-party measurement options are currently available on DoubleClick, though they are not integrated at the ad server level. Marketing regrets the error.
