Sovrn recently won Best Overall Technology for Programmatic Trading at The Drum Digital Trading Awards 2017 in London. Beating off stiff competition from Integral Ad Science (IAS), TubeMogul, Sociomantic, Google Double-Click and many more.
One judge from the panel fed-back: “Your entry was fantastic and I was not the only person who thought that. Congrats again and I am sure you will be mopping up more awards in the future.”
With the huge growth in programmatic advertising spend, the spotlight on viewability has never been brighter. In fact, programmatic display ad spending is forecasted to account for 72% of all display ad spending by 2017, up from just 49% in 2014 (Source: eMarketer, April 2016).
Created by the viewability obsessed team at Sovrn, Viewable Engagement Time is a user engagement metric that enables publishers to sell inventory on their website based on user engagement rather than impressions alone. Sovrn Signal units only create new ad serving opportunities after 30 seconds of viewable engaged time from users. If a reader leaves the browser window or scrolls the unit out of view, it stops counting viewable engagement time and no new ads are served in that zone until the ad is viewable and the reader is engaged.
Signal has major revenue impacts for publishers using the technology. Sovrn publishers utilising Viewable Engagement Time technology have seen an average lift of 56% in programmatic revenue and 51% average lift in inventory.
Viewable inventory is sold at a premium rate because advertisers are willing to pay top-dollar for ads that are guaranteed to garner real-time views. Simply put: they don’t want to pay for ads that are never seen! Because highly viewable inventory is so valued by buyers, publishers with high viewability rates are delighted by a higher yield. Publishers are happy with their increased revenue, advertisers get a better return on their campaigns, and readers benefit from less ad clutter. Win, Win, Win!
Sovrn is focused on evolving the way the industry values and trades advertising by increasing the overall quality and effectiveness of online ads through viewability.
Viewable Engagement Time (Signal) is an alternative currency for monetising banner advertising online, compared to the existing ‘served impression’ CPM model. The premise is that the way that banner ads are currently monetized (Served Impression CPM model) assumes that every impression sold has the same attributes and as such has the same value. The reality is far different.
Not every ad that is served is seen, and even if it is seen the extent of time which that ad is seen, or the engagement level of the user can vary tremendously. At Sovrn, we believe that publishers who create engaging content should be able to monetize based on their user’s onsite engagement, rather than have a static one size fits all approach to monetization.
As things stand, a site that has low user engagement and low page dwell time is rewarded in the same way as a site that nurtures engagement and dwell time. Signal is a solution that enables publishers to readdress this and monetize the full extent of the engaged users that they have nurtured on their sites.
Viewable Engagement Time is powered by more than 10 activity events collected on the page through Signal-enabled ad tags. This spans clicks, scrolls, tab changes and other user actions are aggregated to determine, at any given moment, if, where and how a user is engaged on the page. If the user closes the page, clicks on another tab or is inactive for 5 seconds or more then the Signal timer will stop counting.
Put simply, the benefit to publishers is that they can flip from monetising a static number of ads per page impression to an infinite number of impressions based on the engagement levels of their users. The more engaging your content is, the more rewards you reap. This shift helps publishers create substantial net-new inventory, which we monetize for them at a premium.
In addition to winning Gold at the Drum Digital Trading Awards, Sovrn’s Viewable Engagement Time also won silver in the ‘Technology Provider of the Year’ category at The British Media Awards and is currently a finalist in the ‘Digital Innovation of the Year’ category of the PPA Awards (winners announced on 29th June).
To test Signal on your site get in touch, we are here to help.
