What is viewability or viewable impressions?
A display ad is considered viewable when 50% of an ads pixels are in view on the screen for a minimum of of one second (IAB 2015). The goal is to work towards 100% ad viewability.
The viewability rate is the percentage of ads determined viewable out of the total number of ads measured. Read more about the state of viewability transactions in this IAB report
How have we increased the viewability percentage?
- Remove Auto-refresh. We deactivated auto-refreshing of content on desktop tabs that are not the active browser tab being used. To ensure the latest news is being shown, Norwegian newspapers refresh their webpages every 10 minutes. The whole page gets refreshed including the advertisements. We have removed the refreshing of advertisements that are not active.
- Lazy load ads. A technical solution which results in the ad being loaded only when it is visible on the users screen, so called lazy loading of ads.
- Improve page download time. The download time of the frontpage of VG was improved by over 40%. The scroll speed of our mobile iOS app was also improved. Both resulted in more inscreen ad views as users can quickly access content and scroll pages.
Results
- 70% average viewability rate on all platforms
- Improved the effectiveness of the ad campaigns through increased viewability.
- Improved the user experience since the frontage loads 40% quicker than before.
