In-View and In-Target: Campaign Benchmarks Reveal Variability in Delivery across Europe

• For advertisers, knowing your ads had the opportunity to be seen by the right target audience, in the right geography, in a brand safe environment and free of non-human traffic is critical to ensure your digital investment is well spent.
• For agencies, ensuring your media planning and execution delivers on client objectives is an absolute must to retain and grow business.
• For publishers, validating the quality and value of your inventory helps ensure you attract greater investment from media buyers.

To help guide the industry to better understand campaign delivery on the whole, Comscore releases industry benchmarks from the more than 200 billion impressions it measures across the globe from its Comscore vCE service. Industry benchmarks can be used to help set delivery expectations and provide a powerful indicator of relative campaign performance, but it’s important to remember that there is no normal when it comes to in-view and in-target rates as normal can vary based on a number of factors such as campaign objective, size of target, placement and verticals. Further, as explained in our recent whitepaper Lessons Learned in Digital Advertising, 100% in-view and 100% in-target delivery is not a realistic expectation for a number of reasons based on technology limitations, data availability and end-user behaviour.

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Global Insights Enable Market Comparability
Comscore vCE, which provides campaign measurement in 43 markets, gives the unique ability to understand campaign performance on a global scale.

Global In-View Benchmarks
Analysis of the Comscore vCE Q1 2015 campaign benchmarks revealed that the majority of display ads never had the chance to be seen by consumers in nearly all global regions, with only Asia Pacific seeing viewability rates creep slightly above 50%.

Global In-Target Benchmarks
When looking at in-target delivery the story was no better, with just 37% to 44% of display ads reaching their intended audience across the global regions.

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It’s important to remember that the cause of variation with in-target delivery is the composition of the target itself. The more targeting variables used, such as age, gender and other demographics, the harder it is to reach the target. It is also important to note that impressions that land outside of the target audience may also deliver value to the campaign by reaching and influencing other consumers. Thus, not all impressions that fall outside of the target should be viewed as wasted impressions.

European Deep-Dive
Taking a closer look at European markets revealed that in-target delivery rates ranged from 52% in Germany to 35% in France, while in-view rates ranged from 47% in Germany and Italy to 38% in the UK. This means that in all five markets more than half of ad impressions did not deliver the opportunity to be seen and therefore did not have the chance to make an impact on the consumer.

Interestingly, the UK and France, which are amongst the most advanced markets in Europe for programmatic adoption, saw some of the lowest relative rates of in-target and in-view campaign delivery. This underscores the greater need for increased transparency and trust, especially as programmatic trading continues to gain traction in markets not only in Europe but across the globe.