Google says that in the next few months it will begin charging only for ads that are actually viewable by humans across its Google Display Network (GDN).
All advertisers buying GDN ads on a cost-per-mile basis will be transitioned to viewable CPM (vCPM) pricing, which is calculated based on the number of impressions served that were at least 50% in-view on a user’s browser for 1 second. Buyers won’t pay for any impressions they win at auction, which are judged to be non-viewable by Google’s Active View technology. GDN will also automatically optimize towards viewable impressions.
Advertisers have been pushing publishers and tech companies to guarantee viewability across their inventory, whether by discounting non-viewable impressions or by better optimizing towards viewable placements. AThough it’s not yet commonplace across the industry, a handful of companies like Juice Mobile and recent AOL acquisition Millennial Media offer 100% viewability guarantees.
Google has offered vCPM bidding since 2013, but now it will become the default for all audience campaigns, unless buyers choose otherwise. With vCPM, buyers still set how much they want to bid on impressions, so they still have control over how much they pay; prices won’t automatically increase because buyers are getting only viewable impressions.
However, Google estimates about 56% of display ads on the web are non-viewable, so switching to vCPM could significantly reduce the amount of biddable inventory available through GDN. Over time, that could lead to advertisers having to bid higher to get the inventory they want.
In its blog post on the changes, Google also announced updates to AdWords’ analytics dashboard and dynamic remarketing.
