How Much Ad Viewability is Enough? The Effect of Display Ad Viewability on Advertising Effectiveness∗ Christina Uhl WU Vienna
[email protected] Nadia Abou Nabout WU Vienna
[email protected] Klaus M. Miller Goethe University Frankfurt
[email protected] August 28, 2020 arXiv:2008.12132v1 [cs.CY] 26 Aug 2020 ∗The authors acknowledge helpful comments from Elea Feit, PK Kannan, Carl Mela, and Bernd Skiera, as well as conference participants at EMAC 2017 and 2018 and EMAC 2018 Doctoral Colloquium, Marketing Science Conference 2017 and 2018, Passau Digital Marketing Conference 2018, Theory + Practice in Marketing (TPM) Conference 2018, and seminar participants at Goethe University Frankfurt 2018 and Facebook 2018. The authors did not receive any third-party funding for this project. All remaining errors are our own. How Much Ad Viewability is Enough? The Effect of Display Ad Viewability on Advertising Effectiveness Abstract A large share of all online display advertisements (ads) are never seen by a human. For instance, an ad could appear below the page fold, where a user never scrolls. Yet, an ad is essentially ineffective if it is not at least somewhat viewable. Ad viewability - which refers to the pixel percentage-in-view and the exposure duration of an online display ad - has recently garnered great interest among digital advertisers and publishers. However, we know very little about the impact of ad viewability on advertising effectiveness. We work to close this gap by analyzing a large-scale observational data set with more than 350,000 ad impressions similar to the data sets that are typically available to digital advertisers and publishers.