The
quality of digital advertising has been top of mind of late, but which key metrics -- such as viewability, click-rates and completion rates -- give marketers a better shot at buying quality
video advertisements? TubeMogul, a programmatic video ad platform, teamed with media measurement and fraud detection firm Integral Ad Science to find out.
The two companies studied over 127
million impressions from over 400 video ad placements bought via TubeMogul's programmatic platform and measured by Integral. The companies say they compared each placement against one another and
assigned a rank. The rankings were based on human, in-view completions.
These human, in-view completed views were deemed by TubeMogul and Integral to be the “correct” type of video
ad, and these ads were then ranked again based on other metrics such as viewability, click-rate and standard completion rate.
“We looked at how often a marketer would choose the less
effective placement when optimizing on other metrics and called the frequency of incorrect decisions ‘percentage wrong,’” TubeMogul's report reads.
In other words, TubeMogul
and Integral found the “correct” ad placements -- i.e. ads that were completed, in-view, by humans -- and then determined whether or not optimizing for other key metics (viewability,
click-rate, etc.) would cause the marketer to buy “incorrect” ad placements.
To some degree, this compares apples to oranges. Viewability, click-rate, standard completion rate and
the like all optimize based on one, single metric. “Human, in-view completions” optimizes for three metrics -- verified humans, viewability and completion rates -- all bundled together. Of
course it will be better.
But the purpose of TubeMogul and Integral’s report was not to simply prove that optimizing for “human, in-view completions” was better, but rather
to find out just how much better it was.
The verdict: Marketers spend an extra 15% to 22% per human, in-view consumption when optimizing on other metrics, such as viewability or
click-rate.
“Given that our sample is drawn from advertisers already investing in monitoring viewability and non-human traffic, there is reason to think the broader market may stand to
gain even more.”
TubeMogul and Integral found that when marketers optimize for “standard completion rate,” they make the wrong decision 38% of the time. The second-worst
standalone optimization metric is “click-rate,” which led to wrong decisions 30% of the time, followed by “viewability” (17%) and “unfiltered in-view completion
rate” (10%). “Unfiltered,” in this case, means not accounting for suspicious activity -- i.e. potential non-human traffic.
The full report can be found here.