Google admits that 56% of digital ads are never seen

Online advertisement viewability is somewhat of a hot topic in the advertising industry right now as marketers become more aware, not to mention concerned, that many of the advertisements that they purchase online aren’t actually seen by anyone. A full study of this was done by Think With Google, which found that about half of all online advertisements aren’t even seen.

“With the advancement of new technologies we now know that many display ads that are served never actually have the opportunity to be seen by a user. In fact in a recent study of Active View data by Google, we found that 56.1% of all ads served were not measured viewable,” wrote Sanaz Ahari, group product manager for DoubleClick, on its official blog.

“Yet, the average publisher’s viewability is 50.2%. This means a small number of publishers are serving the majority of non-viewable impressions and dragging down the served impression viewability average by almost 6%,” continued Ahari.

Quartz notes that this isn’t exactly a big revelation, as both ComScore, a web metric company, and Spider.io, an advertisement fraud company that Google acquired back in February, have arrived to the conclusion separately that a significant portion of online advertisements are either never seen, or have their numbers boosted by botnets.

Advertising Age predicts that this publication of data from google, the largest advertisement technology company in the world, will most likely increase the concern of advertisers in regards to the trustworthiness of the digital advertisement industry supply chain.

Google uses the Media Rating Council’s definition of a viewable advertisements, according to VentureBeat, which requires that “50 percent of an ad’s pixels are in view on the screen for a minimum of one second.” This means that an advertisement isn’t considered “viewed” when a user simply scrolls right past it.