This past year, viewability has earned a disproportionate amount of attention in digital marketing. While measuring an ad's chances of visibility on the page is important, this emphasis has taken the marketer's focus off of equally (and arguably more) important metrics such as engagement. Viewability does not suffice as a standalone metric. It's time for marketers to move away from simply counting viewable impressions and instead consider viewability within a greater suite of success measures. Whether marketers are ready or not, disruptive new technologies are already leading this transition. These technologies can help marketers focus less on ad serving and more on communicating their message. The biggest issue with treating viewability as the sole important metric is that it's currently used as a quantitative ad serving stat, rather than a qualitative ad engagement measure. Marketers and agencies have latched on to a percentage rate as the sole indicator of whether someone saw their ad, never mind processed their creative and copy. It's a simple number, but it doesn't go far enough, nor does it do much for ensuring lasting campaign success. In other words, a high viewability score doesn't guarantee a successful campaign. The industry is already moving on, and marketer concerns are turning to new challenges, such as ad blocking. Forward-looking marketers are using models that string viewability together with other key performance indicators (KPIs) to deliver a more effective qualitative score. These KPIs will vary based on the advertiser's vertical, but marketers should start by looking at various aspects of engagement, such as time spent with the ad unit once it comes in view. They can also use heat maps that indicate the type of engagement to better understand consumer behavior. This model better evaluates the validity of each impression and could reshape the market dramatically. Cost Per Engagement (CPE) could become a far more common pricing model supplanting the simple counts of cost-per-thousand or cost-per-click. CPE is already widely available, but the viewability-obsessed marketer needs to be more aware of how they can leverage this model. In-view time is likely to become just as important as basic viewability, while action metrics will gain much more weight in campaign analysis. The ability to measure how and where consumers hover over an ad and the amount of time they hover will open up new ways of understanding how effective a campaign is in delivering a message. Marketers in different advertising verticals will likely adapt to different models as well, looking for the perfect combination of metrics to determine optimal ROI. If viewability has taught us anything, it's that the digital media agencies can't chase an easy solution to a complex issue. The industry has been caught up in counting rather than measuring the qualitative value of an ad impression on a page. It's time for us to focus less on quick fixes, and more on collecting the metrics that matter for their business. Chris Hansen is chairman at Netmining. On Twitter? Follow iMedia at @iMediaTweet.
Viewability has been a growing concern for marketers recently , gaining more attention than competitors . Marketers have become so engrossed in viewable outcomes that they have forgotten to focus on other metrics such as engagement , which can be used to assess campaign effectiveness . Forward - thinking marketers are starting to develop models that string ##ently together with other key performance indicators ( indicators ) to produce a more effective qualitative score .