Facebook Now Allows Advertisers To Only Pay For Ads Actually Seen

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Facebook has come up with a new ad-buying option allowing advertisers to pay only for the ads that are actually seen. The new ad-buying option was announced on Thursday and is applicable to all the ad formats in News Feeds: text, photo, link, and video ads.

Facebook Now Allows Advertisers To Only Pay For Ads Actually Seen

Why are some ads are not viewable?

A policy of charging advertisers only for viewable ads has been adopted by some ad networks and publishers, and now Facebook too is joining that crowd. The new 100% “in-view impression” option allows advertisers to buy ad impressions in which the full ad has passed through a user’s screen in News Feed.

The digital ad industry is facing a persistent problem of viewability. Google estimates that users are not able to view more than half of the ads for one second at least. There can be a number of reasons for the ads not being fully viewable to users. In a situation in which all parties are acting in good faith, it could be due to user error, such as a clicked link opening a new page in another tab, which loads an ad that gets ignored by the viewer because the user never visits that page, says a report from VentureBeat.

At times, it happens that the ad gets loaded at the bottom of the page and goes unnoticed as the user never scrolls down there. It also happens that disreputable publishers place ads on top of ads. In this situation, views are built up all in one space, but it becomes impossible for users to actually view the ads, says the report.

Facebook to charge a premium for such ads

On Thursday, Facebook also announced a partnership with Moat — an ad analytics company – to provide an independent analysis of video ads in terms of ad views and view lengths. All the other News Feed ads will be covered by the Moat verification at some undefined point. Moving forward, Moat’s assistance will also stretch to Instagram, which is expanding its advertising at a very fast pace.

Surely the new ad option will be more acceptable to the advertisers, but it comes at a premium price. Whether the premium paid for 100% viewability is worthwhile is something advertisers should weigh. As of now, there is no information from Facebook on how much of a premium marketers will be charged for the new option.

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