Q-Tag: a transparent solution to measure ads viewability rate in online advertising campaigns

Viewability is one of the most important metrics used in ad-tech to measure the performance quality of ad campaigns. The viewability standard defines the visibility conditions an ad impression must meet to achieve a sufficient marketing eectto be considered viewed. The ad-tech industry offers opaque measures of viewability whose performance is questionable.To address this issue, we propose a novel methodology for measuring viewability in ad campaigns. The disclosure of the functional details of this technique makes it reproducible and auditable. Our solution has been deployed in production by aDemand Side Platform (DSP) to measure the viewability rate of the ad campaigns. Leveraging the infrastructure of thisDSP, we compare the performance of our methodology with ac ommercial solution. Both techniques report a similar overall viewability rate of 50%. However, our solution measured the viewability in 93% of the ads served by the DSP, unlike to74% of the ads measured by the commercial solution. A rough estimation indicates that this increase in the measured rate may lead to a revenue increase of $3.5 million per year for amid-sized DSP serving 100M of ads per da