Q-Tag: A transparent solution to measure ads viewability rate in online advertising campaigns

Viewability is one of the most important metrics used in ad-tech to measure the performance quality of ad campaigns. The viewability standard defines the visibility conditions an ad impression must meet to achieve a sufficient marketing effect to be considered viewed. The ad-tech industry offers opaque measures of viewability whose performance is questionable. To address this issue, we propose a novel methodology for measuring viewability in ad campaigns. The disclosure of the functional details of this technique makes it reproducible and auditable. Our solution has been deployed in production by a Demand Side Platform (DSP) to measure the viewability rate of the ad campaigns. Leveraging the infrastructure of this DSP, we compare the performance of our methodology with a commercial solution. Both techniques report a similar overall viewability rate of 50%. However, our solution measured the viewability in 93% of the ads served by the DSP, unlike to 74% of the ads measured by the commercial solution. A rough estimation indicates that this increase in the measured rate may lead to a revenue increase of $3.5 million per year for a mid-sized DSP serving 100M of ads per day.