Google will soon let advertisers and publishers know whether or not their video ads delivered via the DoubleClick ad services are actually being watched by customers, Bloomberg reports.
This news was announced by Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display and video advertising, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week.
In keeping with the Media Ratings Council’s standard, Google will let advertisers know what percentage of their videos were at least 50% in a customer’s view for at least two seconds or more.
In order to take advantage of this new viewability reporting, advertisers and publishers will need to view the stats using Google’s DoubleClick reporting tools.
As of now, the key metric Google was able to report to an advertiser regarding video ads is whether or not the ad was served. However, an ad can technically be “served” even if the end user never laid eyes on it. Now advertisers will know how many of the ads that were served were actually viewed.
One of the first questions to arise after this news was announced is if Google will be adopting a similar payment system as the one in place for display banner ads. Advertisers only pay when their display ad was viewed.
Google’s VP of display and video advertising addressed that question with a very safe answer that no doubt pleased the PR team, saying more viewability solutions are planned for the rest of this year.
Google plans to extend its viewability reporting to YouTube ads bought on a reserved basis, as well as introduce the ability to report on the average time a YouTube ad was viewable, whether the ad was muted, or playing in a background tab, and so on.
