Advertisers are Getting the Wrong Impressions; Facebook and the MRC Offer New Points of View

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Apr 13, 2015, 10:59 ET

DUBLIN, April 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/ld6dcv/advertisers_are) has announced the addition of the "Advertisers are Getting the Wrong Impressions; Facebook and the MRC Offer New Points of View " report to their offering.
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This report analyzes how the evolution of newsfeed media such as Facebook, and the industry thought leadership of the Media Rating Council, are shaping how advertisers view the effectiveness of the advertising they place not only on Facebook but across all digital venues.

For more than a century, advertisers bought ads in newspapers and magazines in the hopes that if a given media outlet had a certain number of subscribers, most if not all of them would see the ad. Print media extended that reach by conducting research that added pass-along readership to the paid circulation (subscribers) figure: the notion that for every subscriber, a certain number of others would also read that subscriber's copy of the publication. The author worked in the print media3 during its heyday and saw publications credited with as many as seven to pass-along readers for every subscriber.

Print media experienced a meltdown on the readership side as readers moved almost en masse to digital sources for their news and entertainment. In truth, however, the erosion in print media fortunes had already begun because advertisers found it increasingly difficult to justify rising advertising expenditures when it was difficult to quantify, with any degree of accuracy, the impact of a given ad on either sales or brand image.

With the emergence of online advertising-and, more recently, ads served to users via targeted online and mobile Web campaigns-digital publishers can quantify the number of impressions an ad receives. However, the way they have quantified those impressions has raised new questions in the minds of advertisers that cast doubt on the efficacy of digital advertising as a whole.

The most important metric in measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising is the impression: the number of times an ad is seen. For years, the standard for how digital publishers report ad delivery to their advertisers has been served impressions. When an ad is served, it simply means a publisher has directed its system to deliver an ad. If the ad appears where it is supposed to-for example, on a Web page-the system registers delivery of the ad; and every time someone visits the Web page where the ad appears, that is counted as a served impression.

The problem is that the ad could appear at the top of the Web page, seen by every visitor-or the ad could be seen by few or no page visitors, for reasons including:

- The ad appeared at the bottom of the page, or below the fold.
- Visitors bounced, meaning they arrived at a page and left quickly, due to lack of interest or because they clicked on a page they did not intend to visit.
- Connectivity issues kept the ad from rendering fast enough for visitors to see it.

Yet, all of these are still counted by many online publishers as served impressions. In short: with traditional print media, circulation or pass-along readership did not equal impressions; and likewise, in digital media, served impressions do not mean an ad is actually seen

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