This is our second post in the series Emerse on Quality (our first article in the series was about too fast ad reload times). Join us as we delve into key aspects of digital advertising quality control. We've opted to simplify the complex issue of quality by dividing it into manageable, bite-sized sections. We will explore what constitutes 'defect' ad impressions and offer strategies for advertisers to steer clear of them. Our goal is to enhance the quality and performance of ad campaigns.
Before we begin, we’d like to highlight that Emerse is dedicated to providing advertisers with quality, cost-controlled programmatic advertising through a managed service. We apply quality management processes typically seen in industries like manufacturing to advertising. If you’re interested in learning more about our services, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our sales team.
What is ad stacking?
Ad stacking refers to the practice of stacking multiple ads on top of each other in a single ad slot, but only the top ad is visible to users. The other ads underneath remain unseen, though they are technically served and registered as impressions. This can happen in both display and video advertising and is often associated with fraudulent intent to generate revenue by delivering unseen ads.
The implications of ad stacking are primarily negative and multifaceted, affecting advertisers in several ways:
Wasted Spend: Advertisers pay for impressions that are never actually viewed by users. This drains advertising budgets, as a significant portion of the expenditure does not contribute to actual ad engagement or brand exposure.
Skewed Analytics: Since all ads in a stack report impressions, ad stacking leads to inflated impression counts, misleading advertisers about the true reach and effectiveness of their campaigns. This can skew performance analytics, leading to poor decision-making based on inaccurate data.
Damaged Reputation: Brands unknowingly involved in ad stacking may suffer reputational damage if their ads are associated with fraudulent activities, even indirectly. This can erode trust with both consumers and advertising partners.
Reduced Campaign Effectiveness: Real engagement metrics such as click-through rates and conversion rates are adversely affected. The disparity between high impressions and low engagement can lead to incorrect assessments of campaign performance.
How do we detect it?
At Emerse we use a number of tools to analyse ad impressions and ad inventory for quality assurance. We've spent many years refining our technology and methods to find ways to keep track of ad impression quality and avoid low quality ad inventory.
Some examples of ways to detect ad stacking:
Geometric Monitoring: This involves checking the z-index (a CSS property that specifies the stack order of elements) and other CSS properties of ad elements to determine if multiple ads are layered over each other in the same ad space.
Page Layout Analysis: This method analyzes the entire layout of a webpage to ensure that ad placements are visible and not obscured by other content or ads.
Browser Visibility Tests: These tests determine whether an ad is within the visible area of the browser window and not hidden behind other content.
How we can help you run campaigns with less quality issues
We help customers on a daily basis to deliver ad campaigns using high quality configurations that we have fine tuned over many years of working.
We analyse large flows of impression data every day and take action to improve settings and configurations for our customers step by step. Each improvement is for the benefit of all our customers. So the combined flow of ad impressions and the quality control knowledge they generate is of benefit for all advertisers we work for.
Conclusion: Excluding inventory with ad stacking
Measuring and keeping track of potential ad stacking for each publisher and inventory source you buy ads on is important. Once a publisher has been identified as engaging in ad stacking, they can be removed from your targeting site lists (or if you run open targeting, added to a black list). Removing ad impressions with ad stacking will improve the performance of your campaigns as more people will actually see the ad impressions you are buying.
At Emerse we provide customers feedback and input on which traffic we find use methods such as ad stacking.
If you want to run campaigns without buying inventory on low quality publishers make sure to reach out to us today.