Study: Exposure to viewable ads drove a 53% increase in store visits

Now there’s another reason to care about viewability. A new study from Placed and Moat has found that viewable ad impressions actually have a material impact on offline visits and conversions.

The core finding of the study is that viewable exposures directly lifted store visits and sales versus a control group and those who didn’t see viewable ads. Viewable impressions drove a 53 percent lift in store visits and a 20.4 percent in-store conversion lift.

Moat’s role was to determine viewability and Placed tracked store visits using mobile location data and its panel. Here’s how the study was conducted:

To set up measurement of foot traffic to on-premise locations, Moat appended a Placed pixel to the campaign to differentiate between viewable impressions and all impressions. Placed then compared the conversion rates for users served a viewable ad, users served a non-viewable ad, and control groups of users that weren’t exposed to the campaign, with the goal of determining whether users served a viewable ad exhibited higher visitation rates to on-premise (store visits) locations.

A viewable ad impression is defined (by the Media Ratings Council) as a display impression where 50 percent of pixels have been exposed for at least one second. Others, such as WPP’s GroupM, have argued for more strict standards. GroupM uses what it calls an “enhanced viewability” standard, which requires 100 percent of the ad to be in view for some length of time.

Many marketers still think of display advertising as an awareness or branding vehicle and not as a direct response tool. It’s both. Google currently measures the impact of viewable impressions on store visits. Facebook does a version of this today as well, with store visits reporting.

It goes without saying that viewability is important. This study shows that it’s important not just for exposure; it also has the capacity to translate into offline visits and, ultimately, sales.