Over half of online adverts never seen (infographic)

8 Dec 2014

New research from Google shows that 56pc of online adverts are never seen by the user which has led to an increasing number of companies only paying out for adverts that are actually viewed.

Using the definition of a viewed advert, as set out by the Media Rating Council, an advert is only considered viewed if ‘greater than or equal to 50pc of the pixels in the advertisement were on an in-focus browser tab on the viewable space of the browser page’ and this view was for longer than one second.

Using these guidelines, Google’s researchers were able to find that the common trend among the most viewed adverts was shown in ones that appeared vertically on-screen as, unsurprisingly, they persist longer on the screen than one that is small and fits in a quarter of a page.

Meanwhile, they have also been able to determine that the most ideal part of the page to place an advert as being right above the ‘fold’ of the webpage and not on the top of the page, as many websites tend to do with banner headlines.

For example, Google were able to find that adverts with a resolution of 120×240 pixels were able to attain the highest viewability rates at 55.6pc, while a wider advert at 300×250 pixels had a lower rate of 41pc.

Even the type of industry that a website caters to will see large discrepancies between the amount of ads placed and seen by a web user as ‘hobby & leisure’ sites showed the lowest rate of viewability at 44.8pc, while websites that related to ‘reference’ show the highest viewability rate at 51.9pc.

Online sales image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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