Trust and authenticity are long-standing concerns for advertisers, publishers, and consumers. In media and advertising, trust is essential for fostering positive relationships with brands as well as keeping audiences engaged. This has become even more critical with the proliferation of available content and advertisements across all channels competing for users' attention.

The struggle with ad quality measurement

Advertisers have adopted a wide variety of standards and requirements around ad quality which has complicated how publishers need to approach developing a data strategy that meets advertiser expectations, enables optimization, and is scalable. Specifically, many advertisers have adopted some form of viewability as their measure of impression quality, making it a critical component of publisher reporting. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has proposed standards around viewability, but these are not adopted across the ecosystem.
Additionally, while viewability is definitely a factor, a single data point never tells the whole story. A viewable impression does not always mean a high-quality impression. In an ideal world, a measurement of quality would tell the advertiser that, Yes, their ad was fully viewed by a user during an experience that promotes trust with the brand and drove the viewer to engage in some way.
So what else impacts impression quality? It all ties back to the user experience. How the user perceives all elements of a page will affect how they feel and the level of trust they associate with the content they’re interacting with. One mistake publishers will make is to only focus on optimizing for viewability and scale because viewable impressions = billable impressions. This can cause user experience, and thus impression quality and engagement, to ultimately suffer.

Other factors to consider as a publisher:

• Latency and overall site speed
• Content quality and relevance
• Ad quality and relevance
• Site layout
• Ad load

Unified data and transparency is key

With issues around ad fraud and viewability still swirling, it has become even more important that publishers have access to and confidence in the data that is driving advertiser KPIs, quality user environments, and reporting.
At the end of the day, advertisers want to ensure that they are paying for quality impressions, users want to engage with quality content, and publishers want to maintain healthy long-term relationships with advertisers—which involves balancing scale, advertiser requirements (e.g. viewability), and user experience.
With no legal implications of ad fraud and governance organizations, such as the IAB, still struggling to enforce realistic standards that support industry growth, buyers and sellers are left trying to meet goals with siloed metrics and little transparency. Publishers and advertisers must work together to push past these issues. With the right data and analytics tools, optimizing content, ads, and user experience beyond the viewability silo can become a reality.

Ushering in new possibilities for the industry

Ad-Juster has always been a publisher advocate. As an agnostic analytics provider with a deep understanding of publisher needs and operations, we strive to provide effective solutions with data that address the lack of standards. Now, together with DoubleVerify, we are in an ideal position to scale transparency, accountability, and trust across the ecosystem.
Trust and mutual goals for all parties cannot be achieved with opaque and siloed results available to only one side of the transaction. Viewability is still an important factor when looking at ad quality, but going further to unify critical data sets that bring buyers and publishers together with holistic transparency will be the new standard by which mutual goals can be achieved.
Ad-Juster joining DoubleVerify creates the industry’s most comprehensive media quality, advertising performance, and data analytics product suite. Our combined solutions support the full spectrum of enterprise needs, including data transparency and accountability, to deliver the highest quality media and performance.
We look forward to working with you to build a better industry.
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