• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 10, 2015

Yieldex on Tuesday will release a tool in Yieldex Analytics that allows publishers to predict viewable impressions based on historical data to support advertisers that demand greater accountability from their digital advertising spend. Weather.com will become the first publisher to use the analytics feature.

Weather.com, one of several publishers, worked with Yieldex to build out the viewability forecasting feature. It will allow publishers to predict available viewable impressions based on historical data. This feature is one piece of data that publishers have in their toolkit to help respond to RFPs, giving them a better chance to close deals and drive higher revenue. It is also a necessary feature as viewability guidelines continue to drive online advertising.

Logic suggests that all ad impressions should be viewable, but they are not. Publishers want to guarantee a specific number of total viewable impressions, but it's not possible without the correct tools. "Publishers need to say 'I will guarantee one million impressions across my site, but also guarantee 700,000 will be viewable,'" said Anita Khosla, VP of product marketing at Yieldex, which focuses on forecasting, pricing and marketplace tools. The Yieldex platform can forecast 18 months out based on historical data. "Publishers using the tool will be able to guarantee viewable impressions before making the media sale."

Yieldex Analytics now allows forecasting and reporting on available viewable impressions, viewable impression capacity, delivered viewable impressions, viewable rate, and viewable cost-per-thousand (vCPM).

The new features provide publishers with data to support buyer RFPs requiring billing or reporting based on viewable impressions; and enable them to audit their Web site, specific sections or specific pages boost the total viewable percentage; and track order and line performance in the context of viewable impressions.

It works like this: Publishers use ad servers such as DoubleClick for Publishers to serve ad impressions. They collect historical data on the number of ads served or viewed. Yieldex queries and aggregates the data coming from multiple sources to analyze and forecast viewable impressions to help publishers make more informed decisions about how many viewable impressions they can guarantee.