What Is Viewability and How It Affects Digital Advertising

Imagine that, together with your agency, you come up with a fun, unique, and special idea, a campaign that has everything to help you reach your brand’s goals through media.

You go to your boss, present the idea, and guess what? The campaign gets approved. Wow you can’t believe it!

Now that amazing, innovative idea turns into lots of formats and pieces that you run on Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Display, and video through Programmatic. You’re fully loaded and ready to go!

After a week live, the first report comes in… and the numbers don’t add up. You thought it was going to be a huge success, but something feels off. You’re seeing a big reach, but low engagement, few views, and very few clicks. Even worse, your social listening results show that people aren’t talking about your campaign.

What happened? Well, you’re probably about to discover how much viewability really matters in digital advertising.

What is viewability?

Viewability is a very important metric in digital media. It tells us whether an ad actually has the chance to be seen by a person. It’s that simple.

When your ad is shown (or "served"), whether it’s on social media, a website, an app, or any digital space, it might appear in a spot where no one can really see it. For example, it could load below the first screen the user sees, or it might show up in a tiny space, or not be fully visible.

This metric is so important that there’s even an official standard from the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). For an ad to count as "viewable," at least 50% of it needs to be on screen for at least one second (for display ads), or two seconds (for video).

How can I measure viewability?

If you've reached this point in the article, congratulations and thank you! You're already one step closer to becoming a media champion. By now, you'll probably agree with me that running campaigns without measuring viewability is like placing your ad behind a door and then shutting it, or going to the movies just to stare at a blank screen.

To keep your ads from ending up behind that door and missing their chance to shine, you need to know the formula to measure viewability:

(Total viewable impressions measured / total impressions served) x 100

This will give you a percentage that shows how often your ad actually had a chance to be seen. It also reveals how many impressions you're wasting because they're not reaching your audience.

But wait! Hold your horses. Before you rush off to ask your agency, "Why aren't we measuring viewability?", you should know that not every media platform offers built-in viewability tracking.

Probably the most reliable platform for this is Google, which provides a viewability tool called Active View, available through Google Marketing Platform.

So, what about the rest of your digital media? Well, you'll probably have to dig into your media budget. The best way to measure viewability across multiple platforms is by using a third-party tool. These tools independently audit your ad impressions according to specific criteria and rules, ensuring your ads meet your business standards across all digital media.

Some of the best commercial solutions include DoubleVerify, MOAT, IAS (Integral Ad Science), and ComScore. These third-party providers offer more than just viewability measurement; they also help protect your brand through brand-safety policies and safeguard your budget by preventing ad fraud (fake impressions and clicks).

Usually, these services come with a technology fee, billed monthly or annually, as well as an extra cost added to your CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions). It might seem expensive at first, but imagine your current viewability is less than 50%. That would mean you're being inefficient, wasting half of your media budget, and exhausting your team with campaigns that have limited advertising impact.

What can cause low viewability?

Low viewability usually depends on things like the platform you're advertising on, the formats you use, and even the creative aspects of your ad.

Some platforms offer better viewability

Each platform is different. For example, YouTube is a video-based platform, where around 90% of content is viewed in a player that often occupies more than half the screen, depending on viewing mode. Also, scrolling tends to be limited. Non-skippable pre-roll and mid-roll ads force users to watch the entire ad, ensuring good prominence (screen space) and excellent exposure (how long the ad stays on-screen). These characteristics give YouTube excellent viewability.

On the other hand, social media platforms like TikTok, which are heavily scroll-based, tend to have lower viewability. Users quickly scroll through content and can easily skip ads before they've reached the minimum viewing time required to count as a viewable impression.

Formats impact viewability

We talked about platforms, but the ad format itself also matters a lot. For example, Instagram video stories generally have lower viewability than static image stories, mainly because users are used to quickly tapping through them.

YouTube Bumper Ads usually have excellent viewability because they last just 6 seconds, appear before the main content, and can't be skipped.

Another good example is Facebook’s in-stream ads, which also provide strong viewability since they're "thruplay," meaning users must watch at least 15 seconds of the video.

Creative impact on viewability

While many aspects of viewability depend on the platform, ad format, and placement, creativity is key to getting users to stop scrolling and actually watch or interact with your ad. In digital advertising, we're always competing for the user's attention, and it's the creative aspect that helps win this battle.

Improving your creative efforts can significantly boost your ad’s visibility and consumption. Good creativity is so important that it usually enhances other performance metrics, such as View Through Rate (VTR), Click Through Rate (CTR), and engagement rate.

The perfect combination that will always improve your campaign’s performance is a strong partnership between creativity and media optimization.

How can I improve viewability in my campaigns?

Although part of the answer was given earlier, here's a simple checklist of what I'd recommend to improve viewability today:

• Evaluate your last 10 campaigns: Look at all platforms, formats, and placements to establish a benchmark. Remember not to measure every platform by the same standards, as each platform naturally has different viewability levels—think about the YouTube and TikTok examples we discussed earlier.
• Run A/B tests: Experiment with different setups and see if they help improve viewability compared to your benchmark.
• Optimize manually on social media: Stop using automatic inventory selections. Instead, manually pick the top-performing formats and placements for better viewability. Just be careful not to sacrifice too much reach, balance is important.
• For programmatic campaigns: Try making deals with your vendors based on your benchmarks. They can optimize inventory and placements to meet your expectations.
• Innovate with new formats or creative adjustments: Try formats you haven’t used before or make creative tweaks to grab your audience’s attention.
• Segment properly: Digital advertising allows you to target specific interests, behaviors, and demographics. It's essential to segment carefully. Just avoid overly narrow targeting, as hyper-segmentation can sometimes cause worse problems than low viewability.

What is the impact of controlling viewability?

Measuring viewability consistently and gathering enough data about each platform, format, and placement will help you build a clear strategy to make your media budget more effective over time.

For example, IAS (Integral Ad Science), one of the third-party verification services we mentioned earlier, published a case study about Vinda, an Asian FMCG company. They optimized their viewability on Meta, achieving a 34% increase in conversion rate after making those viewability improvements.

Another example comes from IAB Europe, which published a case study titled "Viewability & Exposure Duration: Which Impact on Ad Effectiveness?". One of their most interesting findings was that when viewability is guaranteed, purchase intent increases by 14%. Even more impressive, if the exposure lasts longer than 15 seconds, purchase intent can rise by 23%.

These examples clearly show how important viewability is, how it significantly boosts campaign effectiveness, and how healthy metrics protect your media investment, helping you reach your brand goals.

Conclusion

If you're reading this conclusion—which probably has low viewability after so many words, paragraphs, and lots of scrolling—I really appreciate you taking the time. My best advice is this: If you're not yet measuring viewability in your campaigns, try having a constructive conversation with your media agency. Agree on a step-by-step plan to start measuring this important metric.

Reach out and connect with solutions like DoubleVerify, MOAT, IAS (Integral Ad Science), or ComScore to understand implementation costs and how they might impact your media budget.

Remember, there's no point in spending, say, $1,000 on digital advertising if you're wasting half of it. It's far better to take the money you're wasting and invest it into one of these solutions. Doing so will boost your efficiency and effectiveness.