Video is the most engaging and highly consumable content format in the present-day scenario. Every business is opting for a video-first approach after witnessing this format’s potential and success rate. Though it’s a very engaging format, it has its own challenges regarding video ads. Every publisher knows that for consumers to engage with an ad, they have to be able to see it. That’s where viewability comes into the picture. It measures whether an ad opportunity is seen and delivers viewable video ads to everyone in the advertising landscape—users, advertisers, and publishers. However, in this blog, we will specifically focus on publishers.
Earn more revenue for publishers
Since advertisers value viewability. Increasing your viewable inventory can remarkably improve your inventory, and increase demand, fill and overall revenue. By increasing the viewability of your video ads from 50% to 90%, you can witness a more than 80% revenue jump.
Viewable ads offer a premium user experience and quickly learn about your product or service. In this blog, we have put together some key points to help you increase the viewability of video ads on the website.
How is viewability measured?
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Media Rating Council (MRC) clearly define viewability. It is deemed viewable if 50% of a video ad’s pixels appear on the screen for at least two seconds. Google has adopted this definition and is partnering with the advertising ecosystem to push viewability forward.
Ad Manager is integrated with IAB’s Open Measurement Software Development Kit, which offers publishers a single SDK. This kit can be utilized to access multiple measurement providers, so they can easily measure in-app viewability. This means advertisers can use a provider of their choice for in-app viewability measurement, leading to more transparency, confidence, and flexibility when running ads.
The 3 P’s of viewability
If you want to push your viewability, start maximizing the video properties. We recommend the following for this:
1. Premium experiences
A premium video experience certainly drives more value for your business and can make your video inventory more sought after by advertisers. Advertisers will keep returning to your platform if your site or mobile app loads video content quickly and creates captivating viewing experiences across different devices. To deliver an ace viewable experience, consider the following:
- Integrate a dedicated video section
Creating a dedicated video section on your site or app can help you drive traffic directly to your videos. This can result in more people watching your videos, including embedded ads.
- Improve page speed
When your videos load faster, it is less likely that your viewers will leave before the video starts playing. Hence, it increases the viewability.
- Optimize for responsiveness and speed
Ads typically load faster and have better viewability rates on speedy, responsive apps or sites. This can be particularly important in emerging markets with slower connection speeds. Apps and sites can be optimized by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to analyze the content of a web page; it generates suggestions to reduce latency and make pages load faster.
You can also use Accelerated Mobile Pages to ensure your website loads faster. You can also try using Progressive Web Apps, which loads instantaneously. If you have no clue about them, you can consider getting in touch with a web and mobile app development company.
- Explore lazy loading
Implementing lazy loading means it waits for the video and serves an ad until someone scrolls further on your page. Infinite scroll is a type of lazy loading, which happens when the browser scroll bar keeps scrolling but never reaches the bottom of the page, which causes the page to grow with additional content. Infinite scroll and lazy loading can increase the speed of your website, reduce latency and load time, and improve the viewability of your video ads.
- Create catchy content
Posting catchy content allows you to hold viewers’ attention. Some categories, such as Entertainment, Arts and Games, tend to have higher viewability because of exciting content.
2. Placement
Placement is a crucial factor in enhancing the viewability of your video ads—if people can’t find your content, they can’t watch it. The more prominently you place videos on your mobile app or site, the easier it will be for viewers to find your online content. Consider the below points for better placement:
- Identify where viewers spend time
“Top center” is considered to be the most viewable position on the page, take time to understand user behaviour thoroughly. Moving video players to a higher and centrally located position on the page is recommended. For example, above-the-fold videos get high viewability, but ads below-the-fold shouldn’t be eradicated.
Identify where your viewers spend the most time and place videos in those locations. To test this, you can also try changing the positions of videos and see how it affects viewability.
- Dynamically play in the viewport
Configure a video player to autoplay if the player is in the viewport. Otherwise, you should set it to click-to-play mode.
3. Player
Viewers nowadays look for premium video player experiences. By increasing your video player size and utilizing best practices such as autoplay, click-to-play and sticky players, you can considerably grow the viewability of video ads.
- Use larger video player sizes
You should primarily focus on the video player. Large video players typically have a higher viewability than smaller video players. Also, having a larger video player size will give you a more viewable inventory. Publishers need to evaluate their video ad inventory sizes and eliminate smaller video ads that don’t deliver the desirable viewability.
- Implement click-to-play
Click-to-play ensures higher viewability and user engagement because a person has to click the video to play it, showing intent to watch the video and the ad embedded in it.
- Use sticky players
These players may not be ideal for all websites, especially dynamically evolving pages. You should thoroughly A/B test sticky ad unit performance before implementing the unit across an app or site. If you use a sticky player to enhance viewability, the player must start as a full-size instream unit.
- Use autoplay
Using autoplay correctly is crucial to the quality of your app or site’s experience. As per the Better Ads Standard, auto playing video ads with sound can be a little disruptive to the user and lead them to close the app or website almost immediately. While muted autoplay is allowed, be sure your implementation is aligned with the Chrome autoplay policy.
- Use viewable ad formats
It is recommended to minimize the use of iFrames, an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document primarily found on the site. Ad tags within some iFrames, like cross-domain iFrames can’t be measured by viewability solution, while others, like SafeFrames allow measuring viewability.
The above tips and tricks will help you boost your ad viewability. If you want to get further information in this regard, get in touch with us. We have a team of ad experts who can help you get the most out of your ad campaigns.
