Thanks for posting that! Lots of interesting info.
.

Question, when referencing ads that are viewable above the fold does this mean that a lot of websites are hiding the advertisements via

position

or

display: none;

? Furthermore I'm not sure if payments for advertisements are by click or views? I would presume that if the advertisements are hidden by the website itself then the publishers are paying by views directly?

John

Making sure ads remain viewable when using a responsive is difficult.
With desktop formats, it's easy to find space above the fold.
With mobile, the same high-up ad placement can create a bad user experience because of the lag (blank space) associated with ad load.

According to one of this study's chart, some smaller size ad units produced significantly better visibility than the 300x250 size that Adsense seems to promote.

That suggests to me that Adsense should change it's TOS from a limit of "3 units per page" to something like "as many ads as you want, of any size, as long as the total page foot print isn't more than xxx by xxx pixels."

Having more, smaller sized, ads would make it easier to create responsive themes that get more ads above the fold on both desktop and mobile, without the ad experience being a poor one for the site visitor.

I was sent this last week by our marketing manager and it was interesting. We are in the process of selling space on our site so this is being used to justify our pricing. All our ad spaces are considered viewable. We have run into some companies saying well we get 1 million impressions for less than what you cost is, I go to the site and the ad is at the bottom of the page, were 80-90% of the visitors never go.

I running a lot of ads for a targeted network through google dfp (double click). There is a program called MOAT that I know is used by the targeted network and I suspect also by several other agencies that I use. The program does not deliver ads unless more than 50% of the creative is viewable for 1 second. The most disconcerting part of this is that they don't refer the ads to my default but rather they just send blanks that are not counted at all.

This is scary. My 320x50 mobile ad unit on my responsive site near the top of the page only has a 25% viewability because the ad takes so long to load that the visitor has already started scrolling. Overall very few of my ads come even close to 50% viewability and the lower numbers come mostly from mobile. The skyscraper on desktop has the highest viewability. A category listing page with 10 posts and two 300x250 ads on the page, one in between the 2nd and 3rd post and one towards the bottom receive 30% and 20% viewability. The CTR is still decent. I don't think publishers should be penalized or called scammers just because of low visibility. You get what you pay for.

Monetizing mobile is becoming increasingly difficult. I need to have 2-3 ads per page to make even 75% of what I make from desktop, but there's no way all 3 ads are viewable.

If you're an advertiser you need your ads to appear in the first place, and importantly, in the best place possible. If you're a publisher, it does you no good what so ever to have ads that attract zero revenue.

It really is becoming important to understand what works, and what doesn't, and this presentation will help. It'll probably raise more questions than answers, but that's a good thing to ensure those involved don't become complacent.

If you're an advertiser you need your ads to appear in the first place, and importantly, in the best place possible. If you're a publisher, it does you no good what so ever to have ads that attract zero revenue.

Right. And if you stick your ads too prominently above the fold, you may well get whacked by a panda.

The report has big implications for useful web analytics.

A large affiliate network whose ad set appears on some of my sites has just changed their reporting to include a volume of "click-throughs" that makes no sense whatsoever. (They have a "leave behind" tab, which doesn't seem to me like a click-through, apart from being slightly annoying).

Ad impressions are a little harder to measure because there's no event. Nonetheless, if crazy egg can tell to which point a user scrolls, surely someone could come up with better ad impression data.

Well, as a publisher, I can say I am frustrated by this. I actually approached AdSense about making it so that ads on the page would only load if they would be viewable and was told such coding was against policy. They even went and double checked with higher ups.

I figured it was a win, win for both myself and the advertiser. I would get better CTRs (because ads were actually seen) which would attract more advertisers and a better quality assessment while advertisers would get a better deal (because an ad that is not seen is wasted).

I can only hope that this report is a precursor to AdSense ads that only load when viewable. It is kind of stupid to release a report like this but tell your publishers that they are forbidden to try to improve it.

On the other hand, if that is the case, many AdSense publishers who just don't care about a healthy relationship with advertisers might get really ticked at another "ding" to their income.

I've seen this "story" picked up in a few places in the media both in stories targeted towards Advertisers and towards Publishers. In both places the emphasis is on removing low quality publishers who are responsible for bringing the numbers down. But, no one including Google Doubleclick mentions Google Adsense which is largely responsible for paying high for low viewability ads, since value is dependent solely on clicks.

It seems hypocritical for Google, owner of Adsense, the only substantial PPC ad network out there to be pushing the viewability agenda. We all know that ads at the bottom of pages have high CTR because visitors are finished their task and have nowhere to go. I have an ad that has a 4% viewability at the bottom of all my pages and it pays decent. From an advertiser perspective, what's the difference what percent see the ad, it's the clicks they care about and CTR is not necessarily correlated to viewability.
So what's your game Google? Why are you throwing your Adsense Publishers under the bus and focusing instead on Doubleclick Advertisers. Perhaps in the Display marketplace, Adsense publishers are not important compared to the DSP's and SSP's which are Doubleclick competitors?

Now, I use AdX which pays by impression, and I also use Ad Networks who pay only by CPM and these advertisers do need to be aware of the viewability of their ads, but Google needs to take responsibility for the significant percent of Display ads which are PPC ads where viewability is not important and that fact is missing from this report and I'd like to know why.

AdSense ads that only load when viewable.

Superb idea. 10/10.

If you are selling ads you just need to make sure your advertisers count "view through" conversions in their ROI calculations. Ideally this means that a person saw an ad and then made a purchase within 30 or 90 days or whatever.

Adding in the "view through" conversions in the agency days made the display campaigns look like they performed better than search. I always thought it was a crock but the clients liked the numbers.

I'd push for running a display campaign with two different creatives. The first would be a regular banner of some sort, the second would be a 1x1 clear pixel that just set a cookie.

We'd compare the "ROI" of the performance of the two different creatives and determine how much phoney ROI was baked into the "view through" conversions that got reported to client and made them think display advertising generated a better ROI than search.

AdSense ads that only load when viewable.

Slow loading is in BETA for some [premium] publishers via the Async version of the AdSense code.