The Media Rating Council is planning to release another set of viewability guidelines to address reported discrepancies between measurement providers.
The MRC began auditing measurement companies for online viewability last year, but since then publishers and agencies have reported that measured viewability rates aren’t consistent across providers, even accredited ones.
The discrepancies aren’t always small. According to the U.S. IAB, publishers have seen gaps as wide as 50%. In other words, one provider might say that 90% of a publisher’s impressions are viewable, while another says only 60% of them are.
The reports have called into question the reliability of viewability measurement technology and the validity of the MRC’s approval.
Hoping to resolve the problem, the MRC launched an investigation in January to root out the subtle differences between providers’ methodologies that could be sources of error.
“We want to see the hard data for specific situations that may be resulting in high levels of discrepancy among accredited viewability measurers,” said David Gunzerath, vice-president of marketing for the MRC. “We’re going to look at that hard, and try to identify any remaining reasons that may exist for discrepancies. We think we’ve identified most of them, but we want to make sure we’re not leaving anything on the table.”
The MRC’s goal is to reduce the discrepancy between accredited providers to less than 10%, Gunzerath said.
With the renewed push to charge advertisers for only viewable impressions, publishers are concerned that unreliable measurement may be undervaluing their inventory and putting them at a disadvantage.
Filling in the cracks
So far, the MRC has pinpointed a handful of loopholes in its viewability auditing process that could be leading providers to measure differently.
“We’ve been going through our audit process since we issued the viewability guidelines last year, and as we’ve gone through, we’ve seen in some cases vendors may have misinterpreted something in the guidelines,” Gunzerath said. “For instance, they may be processing things in their viewability decisioning in an order that’s different than what we dictated, and that’s resulting in some discrepancies.”
The problems have been outlined in a draft document that has been distributed to the 18 providers that currently hold MRC viewability accreditation, who will have the opportunity to give feedback before the final draft. The guidelines are expected to be finalized in May.
Disagreement seems to be most common with unusual ad formats, such as rich media or page takeovers, where it’s not always clear what constitutes a viewable ad despite the accepted definition of 50% on-screen for 1 second. Consider a background wallpaper ad — given its size, how likely is it that 50% of its area is going to be on-screen at any point in time?
Quinn Sanders, director of product management for Videology, one of the MRC’s accredited providers, also said that large discrepancies tend to only happen in situations where the ad format or website isn’t optimized for viewability measurement. He said that as a buying platform that also works with advertiser-selected measurers, Videology has seen firsthand that discrepancies between accredited providers can be as much as 30%, but they aren’t very common, and they usually happen in cases where there’s an added layer of complexity interfering with standard measurement.
It’s in those specific-use cases that the MRC needs to be more clear about the proper way to measure, Sanders said. He pointed to several areas the initial guidelines released last year didn’t address, like how to measure viewability when the viewer is connected to an external monitor or TV, and which specific indicators to use to determine whether an ad is on-screen in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or any other browser.
There’s also the pernicious iFrame problem. Although many providers have found ways to measure ads served in the unfriendly iFrame format, the solutions are complex, and there are as many of them as there are providers.
This could be a source of measurement disagreement, especially since the majority of ads are still served as iFrames — 53% of impressions in Canada, according to a recent report from Eyereturn.
But even if the MRC does give crystal clear guidance, differences between vendors may persist. Alex White, VP of product for the MRC-accredited Sizmek, said there are good reasons for providers to do things differently. Each measurer has their own “special sauce” that they believe makes their measurement more accurate. They face a tradeoff between being consistent with other providers and using proprietary techniques to differentiate their offering.
“Discrepancies can be reduced, but I doubt that they will ever truly be eliminated,” he said. “As long as there are differences in measurement methodologies, there are going to be differences in results.”
White said the MRC’s reconciliation guidance is a step in the right direction, but the industry as a whole has a lot more work to do to develop an “absolute formula” that can ensure 100% viewable impressions.
“When it comes down to it, the buyer, seller and vendor need to correctly set their expectations around viewability in order to ensure that all parties are happy at the end of the day,” he said. “As the IAB has mentioned, determining whether an ad was viewable or not is only the starting point, not the end, of the conversation. In order to measure true effectiveness and engagement, advertisers need to combine viewability measurement with other key performance indicators.”
