• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Publishers should be happy with themselves—programmatic ad impressions are landing at a better rate than they did two years ago, judging by Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, a Q1 2025 study by ANA. 

The new report shows that 41% of programmatic budgets are resulting in “effective ad impressions—those delivered by publishers meeting their quality requirements.” This is up from 36% in 2023. 

Moreover, there has been a decline in low-quality Made for Advertising (MFA) placements—to 0.4%, down from 15% in 2023. Average MFA spending decreased by $7, continuing a trend. 

However, the TrueCPM Index Index shows what the study calls “a 37.8% optimization gap.” That’s the percentage of impressions that do not meet standard quality metrics based on viewability. 

In addition, the ANA benchmark shows a 2.9% decline in ad spending productivity compared to Q4 2024. 

This was happening as the median number of domains and apps used by marketers rose from 22,654 to 53,799. Of course, 90.3% of those were served on the top 3,000 domains and apps.

On a cost basis, 41 cents of every ad dollar entering a Demand Side Platform reaches the consumer, versus 43.9 cents in Q4 2024 and 36 cents in TrueAdSpend. 

These reductions contributed to what the study calls a “Cost Waterfall.”  

On another front, CTV ad spending is expected to hit $33.4 billion, a 15.8% increase YoY. But CTV comprises only 9.6% of the total digital ad spend in the U.S. 

Then there is the issue of data integrity: the study notes that benchmark marketers “achieved PCI (Publisher Compliance Index) scores ranging from 21.4% to 48.4%, with a median of 30.9% based on ad spending directed towards domains rated by Compliant (developer of the PCI), indicating that there is room for improvement in buying impressions on sites with better data integrity and privacy ratings.”