In programmatic advertising, viewability is a key metric that determines whether or not an ad was actually seen by a user. If you’re investing in digital ads—whether on Pinterest, Google, or other programmatic platforms—you want to ensure your ads are visible to the audience. In fact, viewability is often directly tied to campaign performance metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and return on ad spend (ROAS).

In this guide, we’ll explain how to calculate viewability and offer insights into how it affects the success of programmatic display and video ads.

What is Viewability in Programmatic Advertising?

Viewability measures the percentage of served impressions that were in a visible area of the user’s screen. In programmatic advertising, viewability is especially important because many ads are automatically served across multiple publishers and placements. To optimize your campaigns, you need to ensure that these ads are actually being viewed—not just served.

Let’s look at an example, if a programmatic video ad loads at the bottom of a webpage but isn’t visible to the user, it counts as an impression but not a viewable impression.

Why is Ad Viewability Important?

• Campaign Performance: High viewability ensures that your ads are seen by your target audience, leading to higher engagement, more clicks, and conversions.
• Ad Budget Optimisation: Low viewability leads to wasted impressions, where you pay for ads that users never see. Optimising for viewability reduces ad spend waste.
• Brand Safety and Trust: Advertisers who focus on viewability build trust with publishers and platforms by ensuring that their ads meet quality standards.

How to Calculate Viewability for Programmatic Ads

To calculate viewability for programmatic display ads, you need to access the data provided by the platform you are using (Demand Side Platform, Ad Exchanges, Supply Side Platform, etc).
The process can vary depending on the specific platform you are using, but generally, you would need to log in to the platform and navigate to the campaign or ad group level.

Once you have accessed the data, you can calculate the viewability using the following formula:

• Viewable Impressions: The number of times an ad was served and met the industry standard for viewability.
• Total Impressions: The total number of times the ad was served, regardless of whether it was seen or not.

For display ads, the Media Rating Council (MRC) standard requires at least 50% of the ad’s pixels to be in view for at least one second. For video ads, at least 50% of the video player must be in view for at least two seconds.

Example Calculation:

If you have:

• 50,000 total impressions
• 35,000 viewable impressions

Then, your viewability rate would be:

Viewability = (35,000 / 50,000) x 100 = 70%

This means that users actually saw 70% of your ads, while 30% of impressions went unseen.

Understanding Platform-Specific Viewability Tools

It’s important to remember that different platforms and vendors may have other methods for measuring viewable video advertising, so you must check with the specific platform’s documentation or support team if you have any doubts. Additionally, some platforms may have their proprietary viewability measurement tools, and they may provide you with a viewability score rather than a percentage.

Conclusion: Why Viewability is Key for Programmatic Success

In programmatic advertising, viewability is not just a performance metric—it’s a measure of the effectiveness of your ad spend. Higher viewability rates lead to better campaign results, as more of your ads are actually seen by the intended audience. By continuously monitoring and optimising for viewability, you ensure that your programmatic display and video ads deliver meaningful impact and higher engagement.

If you’re ready to take your programmatic advertising to the next level, speak to our team who would love to help!