A good friend of mine told me last week that he doesn’t believe in display advertising because nobody actually sees the ads. They’re fake he says. Just numbers on your stats screen. With all the talk about viewability lately it’s become fairly common knowledge that a majority of banner ads are, in fact, not see by humans.

Google’s active view technology forecasts predicted viewability for banner placements across the web. We ran a report in DoubleClick Bid Manager of the past 30 days traffic inside the United States to see exactly what percentage of all traffic had poor predictive ability rates. The results even surprised me…

Over 62% of all banner ads had a less than 10% predicted viewability rate! So what does this mean to you as a marketer? Should you stop selling display ads entirely? Well, we wouldn’t jump the gun yet on that one. Here at AdMind, we focus on performance marketing. So even if 62% of the ads are never seen by a human what about the other 38%? Also, you must keep in mind that price is everything. Those low predicted the viewability CPMs are pennies while higher predicted viewability CPMs could range anywhere from $1 to $50.

This simple stat alone reinforces the need to take your campaigns programmatic. If you would like to launch a display campaign with us using DoubleClick Bid Manager, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help you reach your return on ad spend goals.