A U.S. based study of 12 national premium brands sponsored by ComScore says that 31 percent of ad impressions measured were never seen by a consumer and that in-view percentages ranged from 7 percent to 91 percent.

Now, ComScore conducted the study as part of its promotion of its Validated Campaign Essentials product, but the numbers bear examination, because the promise of digital advertising has always been better targeting and better measurement.

ComScore said they studied 12 national brands, 3,000 placements, 381,000 domains and 1.7 billion ad impressions, across advertisers such as Allstate, E*TRADE, Kellogg’s, Kraft, Sprint and others.

According to the results, an average of 4 percent of ad impressions were delivered outside of the target geography. At the high end, the mis-targeting ran as high as 15 percent on individual campaigns. In many cases, ComScore reports, ads were served in markets outside of those where the product is sold.

This calls for not only better auditing and measurement tools, but also better IP address geolocation services. If AT&T reports all their consumer DSL IP addresses as living in Richardson, Texas, it’s going to be hard to target their customers outside of Richardson.

ComScore said that 72 percent of the campaigns studied had some ads running beside “unsafe” content as determined by the advertiser, but they didn’t say how many impressions that represented out of the total. Still, better tools are needed to characterize and qualify sites for delivering ads. ComScore’s study highlights not just the need for auditing, but for better targeting tools as well.

Also interesting is the overabundance of of ad inventory, which is effectively limitless. “The display advertising market today is characterized by an overabundance of inventory, often residing on parts of a web page that are never viewed by the user. This dilutes the impact of campaigns for advertisers and represents a drag on prices to publishers,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, President and CEO of comScore. “Conversely, some ads below the fold are quite visible and deserve more credit.”

Aside from auditing, this tells me that advertisers need to think more, and investigate more, about their ad placements, almost on a site-per-site basis.
David on Google+