Measuring Ad Viewability

Just because your ad is served on the web or in an app, doesn't mean people will see it. Viewability tells you whether an ad had the chance to be seen or not.

INTERACTIVE DEMO

Are your ads seen?

See how viewability works in real time and discover ways to optimize your ad spend and ensure it's allocated to the most valuable media.

VISIT THE DEMO

What is ad viewability?

Viewability is a measure of whether an ad had a chance to be seen by a user. It helps marketers by providing metrics on the number of times their ads actually appear in front of users.

So why does this matter? If an ad isn't seen, it can't have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. Viewability helps marketers understand campaign effectiveness and allows advertising spend to be allocated to the most valuable media.

Measuring viewability for your ads

What is Active View?

Now that you know more about viewability and its importance to your media plan, how can you measure it?

Google offers Active View — a free, transparent, and effortless solution, accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC), that measures viewable display and video impressions across the web and in apps. Active View is integrated into all of Google's advertising products and measures, in real time on an impression-by-impression basis, whether an ad was viewable. Each impression is directly measured. No sampling. No extrapolating.

What are viewable impressions?

In an effort to foster greater standardization around what is considered a viewable impression, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the MRC collaborated with hundreds of major agencies, advertisers, publishers, and technology providers (including Google) to develop a collective industry standard.

At Google, we support the IAB and MRC definition of viewability: a minimum of 50% of the ad is in view for a minimum of one second for display ads or two seconds for video ads.

So why is it important to have a common currency?

The role of a common currency in spurring growth, investment, confidence, and trade is undeniable — no matter if it's the gold standard, the U.S. dollar, or a standard around measuring viewed ads. Viewable impressions as a currency and a form of measurement provide advertisers transparency into how efficient their media investment is.