• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, February 14, 2012

The Interactive Advertising Bureau today released the final version of its ad verification guidelines. Developed in conjunction with the Media Rating Council, the guidelines aim to insure a common set of methods and practices for ad verification and minimize ad impression discrepancies between publishers and advertisers.

“While ad verification in principle is valuable to the digital advertising industry, the lack of accountability created tension between the publishers and marketers. We developed these guidelines to introduce a level of consistency into campaign assessments commensurate the industry's standards for impression measurement,” said Steve Sullivan, VP, advertising technology, IAB, in a statement.

Among the topics covered in the verification guidelines:

Ad-serving prevention (“ad blocking”): Recommends that ad blocking may be used in instances where the relevant domain or page-level URL is already on a blocking list, for competitive separation and fraud prevention. Ad blocking should only be built into ad serving systems, so decisions are made pre-serve.

Nested iFrames: Ad verification vendors should have procedures to classify and report whether advertising served into iFrames from other domains has been appropriately executed. In addition, the general nature of the verification tools used to view iFrame content should be disclosed.

Geo-targeting IP-based processes: Geo-targeting vendors should subject their processes to independent auditing and that natural differences in geo targeting accuracy between vendors be taken into account.