Not all inventory is created equal.
We all want campaigns that deliver a good return on our investment but finding value in a programmatic campaign comes down to more than just price.
Step 1 of a successful campaign is making sure that someone (ideally your target audience) actually views your ad.
Viewability or whether or not your advertisement is seen by a real human being is a key indicator of inventory quality. If your ad is at the bottom of a page and the user doesn't scroll down that far - then your ad wasn't viewed - but you still paid for it...
Our collection of Premium Publishers have an minimum viewability rate of 60% across SE Asia. Within Australia and Singapore, our minimum viewability is 70%
Compare this to inventory purchased via an exchange where Google’s data puts the average publisher viewability rate at 44%. That means more than half of all paid ads are never seen.
Why is VCPM so Important?
We recommend that all our demand clients include viewability Cost per Million or VCPM as a key metric for every campaign.
You can calculate the VCPM of your campaign using the following formula:
Total Spend / ((Total impressions * % in-view) / 1000) = vCPM
Rather than measuring just the cost of serving 1000 ad units (CPM), VCPM measures the cost of serving 1000 ads that are viewed by a real human being.
Low cost exchange inventory is usually cheap because it has a low viewability rate. If you consider the VCPM for that same inventory - it suddenly becomes far more expensive.
Premium inventory on the other hand generally has a much higher viewability rate. Whilst the CPM may be more expensive than exchange inventory - the VCPM is generally much lower.
As a practical example, let's take a campaign with a budget of $100,000. You have 4 types of inventory to choose from and the CPM determines how many impressions you can purchase within your budget.
The inventory with the cheapest CPM gives you the most impressions but in this example, actually offers the lowest return on your investment.
Premium Inventory ensures that your campaign budgets are spent more efficiently with considerably less money wasted on ads that have never been seen.