Accordant Media: viewability improved 62% YoY in Q1
A report released by Accordant Media relating to the first quarter of 2016 suggests that cross-device marketing is imperative and that viewability has improved by 62% YoY, as marketers optimise and leverage data. Accordant's senior director of analytics and insights, Ben Diesbach, said digital ad viewing was making marketers feel more in control, but while viewability was one of many determining factors in price, he said, “There’s value at different levels of viewability in the media-buying marketplace.” The increasing use of non-traditional methods to transact media, especially via smartphones which accounted for 71% of all mobile programmatic transactions in Q1, is giving people a clearer idea of how media works for them.

In first-quarter 2016, viewability improved 62% year-over-year, while non-human traffic (NHT) decreased by 81% over first-quarter 2015, per Accordant Media’s Q1 RTB Market Pulse Report.

Arthur Muldoon, co-founder and CEO of Accordant Media, said there is more confidence around viewability.

Why should marketers feel more self-assured about digital ad viewing? Empowerment through data. Ben Diesbach, senior director-analytics and insights, Accordant, said marketers are now starting to understand how to take traffic from measurement solutions and make it actionable -- thereby getting a better hold on how to optimize data and leverage it in a scalable way.

"I think we expect people will recognize viewability is part of a metric that determines price, but it’s not the only one," Muldoon said. There’s value at different levels of viewability in the media-buying marketplace, he added. If you can buy 80% in-view and it costs you $100 or 40% in-view for $30, there's a higher return on the 40% in-view.

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"There’s so much understandably knee-jerk attention to wanting the highest percent of viewability, but as you untangle that a little bit, the idea of a viewable CPM is a more sensible approach in our mind," Muldoon added.

In addition, the report found media auction volume jumped 217% year-over-year in the first-quarter 2016. Muldoon said this finding is a testament to the strength of the programmatic market and the migration of publishers' inventory to exchange-traded inventory.

North American exchange-traded inventory came up by 165% year-over-year and 34% in first quarter. Diesbach said people are more prominently using nontraditional means of transacting media, and getting a clearer view on how media is working for them through media measurement and validation.

Other findings include:



-- Smartphones accounted for 71% of all mobile programmatic transactions in the first quarter of 2016, up from 59% in Q4 2015. Diesbach said people use smartphones throughout the day, so there's more opportunity to hit people on those devices.

-- Accordant Media found a 19% higher conversion rate when multiple devices are used, and 26% additional conversions occur out-of-app among users who start signing up in-app. Muldoon said there’s a lot of attention to in-app inventory, but it shouldn’t end there -- once you’ve started to cultivate an association within an app, it makes a lot of sense to follow consumers across desktop and mobile.



-- The U.K. accounted for roughly 14% of the EMEA programmatic ecosystem in Q1, and France displaced Turkey as the No. 2 market in the region.