All you need to know about impression-based advertising

The advertising space is overcrowded. The demand is high and the prices are even higher. In advertising, one may not necessarily reap what they sow. While consumers are becoming increasingly blind to ads, the high expectations of advertisers are all too often unrealistic. The new AdSigner web service is generating new advertising space and new sales opportunities. The ads in it are not only viewable and actually seen, they are even welcomed and memorised by the recipients.

The marketing industry experts estimate that an average American is exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day, both conventional and digital. In view of the target audience criteria, the appearance of a paid advertisement within online context is called an impression. An impression is a valuable opportunity to address potential customers.

The number of times an ad is shown is a measurable unit and a method of selling the online advertising space. The basic billing unit, which is typically 1000 displayed ads, is called CPM, i.e. Cost per mille = thousand (Lat.). The Statista platform reports that in Q3 2019, the average CPM for various display networks stood at €4.85. In this type of advertising, the cost-efficiency per ad impression is called the Cost per impression (CPI) and is calculated based on the total cost of impression-based advertising and the number of ad impressions.

Cost per impression ($) = Advertising cost ($) / Number of impressions

However, the actual performance of display advertising is not measurable by the number of impressions, but rather based on the actual visibility of the impression (i.e. viewed impressions) and the resulting individual’s activity (CPA), which in some cases leads to a final conversion. Ever since the ad impressions started to be measured, i.e. served impressions, the advertising metrics has increasingly been leaning towards the defining and counting of viewable impressions. The Media Rating Council defined the viewable impression as: "… a minimum of 50% of the pixels in the advertisement (that) were in an in-focus tab on the viewable space of the browser page for at least one continuous second."

There are several reasons why many ads are never shown. On the one hand, the skilful psychological virtue of online consumers, which is called ad blindness, plays an important role in this. According to Search Engine Land, as many as 70–80% of web users effectively ignore the ad content in search results. On the other hand, there are also technical aspects to be taken into account when it comes to ad impressions. MonetizeMore reports that as many as 76% of the studied non-viewable yet displayed ads never actually appeared in the user’s visual field. As many as 24% of non-viewable yet displayed ads were scrolled off-screen or closed in less than two seconds. The Wikipedia entry “Viewable Impression” summarises some of the key technical reasons behind the invisibility of served ads, which are useful to know and understand in the context of display advertising:

• The viewer clicks on another web page before the ad loads and renders.
• The ad loads, but in the area of the web page that is not within the viewer’s browser window dimensions and scrolling position.
• The requests are made by spiders, crawlers, web directories, download managers, link checkers, proxy servers, web filtering tools, harvesters, spambots etc.
• The viewer has a particular type of ad blocker installed that could disrupt the ad serving but still be initiate the count of an impression.
• The viewer does not have the proper plug-in to render interactive media installed.
• The viewer opens a page on a mobile device that is not configured to show the ad content.
• The viewer minimises the browser.
• The viewer opens another browser window or another application.
• The viewer opens another browser tab.
• The viewer shifts focus to another browser or application.
• The viewer moves the browser window so the ad is outside the display screen area.
• The viewer has multiple home pages set, so when the browser is open, two pages open in two tabs, and an ad resides on the tab that is not in focus.
• In the case of pre-roll video and video advertising, if the viewer minimises the browser, tabs away from, or opens another application over the video while the advertisement is playing or moves the browser window so the video is outside the display screen area.

A new look in advertising and a new opportunity for advertisers

AdSigner is a new online service that delivers effective and affordable display advertising, while successfully responding to issues that have so far caused many paid online ads to never be seen:

• The banners are actually displayed with every opened email that has been sent to the recipient during the daily business communication. Signatures and banners have been tested for a seamless display in all the most common email clients. This avoids the email signature line breakage and blocked banner content.
• In most cases, a displayed banner means that the ad is viewable, because the advertised message is positioned before or after the email signature, which signifies the credibility of the sender’s identity. In regular business communication, emails mostly get read all the way to the closing lines, which spontaneously guides recipients to the banner. Since the banner gets replaced automatically, it is a welcome and interesting visual enhancement of the otherwise quite bland electronic correspondence. It is an eyecatcher in every sense of the word.
• The audience is carefully selected for each ad view. The targeting could hardly be better. The recipients of your emails are your primary target audience. Whomever you have communicated with via email is very likely to be your new or returning customer. At the same time, your reputation spreads by word of mouth as well as with every forwarded email that contains your banner. It provides a spontaneous sales promotion, without any extra cost, time or effort. Because the recipients of each employee’s emails are so specific, you can create a unique ad campaign for each user or department with a set of banners that get automatically replaced within a selected time interval.

• Ad impressions are not charged for. Since only a monthly subscription is paid, the tool allows an unlimited number of ad impressions and views. This way, AdSigner provides one of the lowest CPMs and a 79.4% saving in the ad display costs.
• No impression frauds. The banner impressions that can be monitored via an integrated analytics dashboard reflect the actual situation. This allows you to monitor the performance of ad campaigns in real time and adjust them as needed.
• Business information security at the highest level

Meet the AdSigner A remarkable turning point in the impression-based advertising.

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