4 ad metrics which will shape the industry landscape in 2017

When the Greek philosopher Heraclitus proclaimed that “change is the only constant” 2500 years ago, he may as well have been talking about today’s online advertising industry.

Your trusted ad metrics from 2016 may still be relevant. But they’re no longer enough. Here are 4 metrics which are set to shape online advertising standards this year.

1) Aggressiveness

I could rant for hours about ad-blocking. It’s a major concern for publishers and advertisers alike, and is normally attributed to high impact and aggressive ads. We all have to do more to create the right impact for each individual user. If you don’t have the right platform to be more granular, and you’re serving the same ads to all users, it’s probably best to err on the side of caution and be more conservative.

In an attempt to improve the user experience, Google said it will penalize mobile sites abusing interstitial ads in its search results. As this issue gains momentum, I expect publishers to demand quantitative measures so that they can understand exactly how disruptive, or not, the ads served on their sites are. At FirstImpression.io we’re working on implementing new metrics that will measure the aggressiveness of different ad formats.

2) Viewability

Thought you heard a lot about viewability in 2016? This buzzword is sticking around. And it will become an even more important metric this year as the advertising industry becomes more performance-based and arms itself with better tools to measure the viewability of ads. Expect to see ad viewability driving advertising budgets.

Kean Graham, CEO of ad monetization partner MonetizeMore, explains that “more advertisers are realizing how small average viewability is for their purchased ad impressions. Viewability tracking is a pushback from advertisers. Google has already offered 100% guaranteed viewable inventory and offers viewability metrics on DFP and AdX.”

3) Video watch time

Marketers may forgive King Facebook for inflating how long viewers spent watching a video ad by over 60%. But they won’t forget. Last year’s error will ensure that this metric enjoys greater prominence in 2017. Advertisers will now carefully track video watch time. They’ll likely turn to third-parties or ad-tech services for this, instead of trusting walled garden platforms like Facebook.

Watch time is essential for determining a campaign’s success and future budgets. How long a user watches a video ad is a great indicator of their engagement and interest. Video watch time and viewability will combine to form the basis for all decisions about video advertising budgets and performance.

4) Ad speed

If publishers weren’t already concerned enough about ad speed, they should be now. Google and Facebook are cracking down on page loading times in order to improve the user experience, especially on mobile. Kean Graham wants to see “ad speed measuring tools [that] will enable isolating ad placement speed performance.”

We may also see more publishers move away from ad setups that cause page latency in the first place. Purch is testing out server-to-server integrations, while a number of ad-tech companies, like ourselves here at FirstImpression.io, use an asynchronous tag that reduces the impact on the page loading time.

 

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.