What is Ad Viewability and How Does It Affect UX?

In this episode, Whitney reviews what ad viewability is, the dos and don'ts of ad viewability, and how it can affect UX. She also goes over what proper ad viewability should look like and the best way to find a balance between viewability and user experience. Ad viewability is (or viewable ad impression) is when more than 50% of the ad pixels for more than one second is counted as viewable impression. The average ad is viewed for 1.7 seconds and only 20% of ads are viewed for two seconds (which is the minimum standard for viewability). This means 80% of users are scrolling faster than that, lowering ad viewability. If ad viewability is low, advertisers will reduce their ad spend. Many publishers over-optimize for viewability and have responded to this by creating forced viewability of ads. However, this ends up hurting user experience, which will in turn lower your ad rates and how advertisers bid over time. It will also harm your rankings in Google. If a user immediately bounces back to Google once they click on a website because they want to pick a different result, that is a black mark against you. Additionally, high bounce rates will harm your rankings. Natural viewability of ads is when the ads do not interrupt a user’s interaction with the content. The only real way to do this is through multivariate testing with artificial intelligence so that you can find the sweet spot between the two, like Ezoic’s Ad Tester. Artificial intelligence allows you to have these decisions made for your website instantaneously and for each individual user. Over time, as AI gathers more data on what is working and what isn’t, this will become increasingly more accurate. It is important to have good ad viewability, but if you’re not considering bounce rate, engaged time on page, and pageviews per visit, you’re lessening your users’ experiences and lowering the overall ranking and value of your website. This is especially important in the near future, as Google recently introduced the Core Web Vitals, one of which is CLS, or Cumulative Layout Shift. This is exactly what we were talking about before--how much the layout shifts or jumps for the user. It is always a good idea to first focus on and prioritize your users’ experience, as this is the foundation for literally everything else your site does and needs. To read about ad viewability and user experience, check out our blog: https://www.ezoic.com/what-is-ad-viewability/