For the first time ever, the digital media advertising intelligence provider Integral Ad Science's "Semiannual Review" will include insights from the company's proprietary TRAQ score, which provides a single holistic metric that helps buyers and sellers determine the overall quality of each one of their ad placements, and particularly how this impacts consumer engagement.
The review, which provides key discoveries on "media quality themes across the digital advertising industry," analyzes billions of ads and Web pages every day, and the new TRAQ score is based on various environmental and exposure factors, such as brand safety, page content and structure, viewability and share of view, ad clutter, ad collisions and the likelihood of fraudulent or suspicious activity.
According to the report released by Integral Ad Science, ad placements that were purchased directly from publishers had the highest average TRAQ score with 720 out of 1000. Following those placements were advertisements bought through ad networks (with an average TRAQ score of 593), hybrids (587) and ad exchanges (560), and all of these values fall within the company's "satisfactory" range. Higher scores suggest better performances for both direct response and brand advertisers.
Integral Ad Science's review also looked at different verticals, where "shopping" had an almost perfect TRAQ score of 980. It also revealed that around 20 percent of all ad impressions are suspicious of being fraudulent, and when looking only at advertisements from ad exchanges, that number increases to 30 percent. Moreover, the number of ads viewed on mobile and tablet devices have nearly double, and nearly 20 percent of ads now collide with an advertisement from the same campaign. Finally, the Semiannual Review said that viewability had remained (mostly) consistent since the last report, with an average of 44 percent of ads staying in view for at least one second across channels, while less than 20 percent remain in view for 15 seconds or longer.
