ComScore Intros Free Viewability Measure

ComScore today announced that it will offer free viewability measurement to clients across global markets.

ComScore Viewability is a baseline offering that allows digital media buyers and sellers to measure viewability rates across display, video and mobile inventory. This initiative, the company says, is designed to promote trust and transparency in digital advertising and improve cross-media comparability.

Viewability is an increasingly expected part of advertising verification, comScore says, but can consume measurement budgets and displace other important campaign metrics. As a result, ad effectiveness is often gauged by viewability metrics alone, even though these speak only to whether an ad impression is seen and not whether it made an impact.

By enabling media buyers and sellers to measure viewability at no cost, the company says comScore Viewability increases clients’ ability to focus on deeper performance metrics, such as reach within geographic and demographic targets and lift in brand awareness, purchase intent, visitation or product sales.

“Viewability is critical, but for too long it has dominated industry discussion at the expense of other metrics that also really matter,” said Dan Hess, comScore EVP of products. “We think it’s time to make viewability a table stake for digital advertising, and move the market forward to a broader realm of more meaningful ad measurement across platforms.”

ComScore Viewability becomes available globally this summer as a free, self-service offering with baseline reporting metrics, delivered through a fully redesigned user interface.

This offering uses the same measurement tag and technology as comScore-validated Campaign Essentials (vCE), which means the metrics provided in comScore Viewability will align with vCE-reported data. vCE is accredited by the Media Rating Council for viewability for display and video impressions in desktop and mobile environments, and includes filtering of both general and sophisticated invalid traffic. ComScore Viewability has not yet been accredited.