Viewability is the metric that tells us how "viewable" an ad unit is. Ads that are seen will always pay more than ads that are not seen, so this metric is really important to advertisers when they decide how they are going to spend.
Learn how viewability is measured.
If you are really into all the details, we have an excellent blog post on all things viewability, but here's the quick overview.
➡ For Standard Display Ads: Half of the ad must be seen by an active user for 1 second.
➡ For Larger Display Ads: 1/3 of large ads must be seen by a user for 1 second.
➡ For Video Ads: 50% of the video ad must be seen for 2 seconds of continuous playback by the user.
You can check viewability in your Viewability Health Check!
Teal Goals are 63% Viewability on Desktop and 58% Viewability on Mobile.
It is important to note that the goals we have set are just that: GOALS.
It takes time for viewability to improve, so if your metrics are low, use the suggestions below and watch things over the next month.
You can also see how viewable certain units are in your Ad Unit breakdown.
Learn how to increase viewability (and advertiser spend!)
Increasing viewability is all about making sure that your ads are actually where your readers are, and understanding how readers are actually using your site. Here are the things you will want to enable or pay close attention to, to increase viewability (which increases advertiser spend!).
Double check that you have both Optimize Ads for Mobile Pagespeed AND Optimize Ads for Desktop Pagespeed enabled.
If you are worried about the specifics of the Optimize for Desktop Pagespeed setting you can learn more here.If you have a recipe or DIY how-to card in your post, enable the Jump-to-Card function. Viewability can be affected by people scrolling too quickly to get to the most valuable content at the end of the post. A properly implemented jump button will help.
Enable the Arrival Unit. If you do offer a jump-to-card button on your site, this is a MUST-HAVE.
Recipe and How-To Cards perform best with Mediavine's default settings.
Create, WP Recipe Maker and Tasty users can choose "Default" for Recipe Instruction Density and Default Recipe Ads in the In-Content Ad Settings tab of the Mediavine dashboard. (For those running Create- List Ad settings are still in the MVP tab of your Create Settings)
If you aren't running the Adhesion Unit on mobile, desktop, and tablet, you should be. The Adhesion Unit has 95%+ viewability.
Look for conflicts. This is especially common with the Adhesion Units. Be sure you don't have any share buttons or cookie disclosures etc overlapping your ads. It can help to view your popular posts in a private or incognito window.
SITE SPEED 😱 Our obsession with fast sites is in part because a faster site will make you more money. So once you've exhausted your settings options, you'll want to make sure you have a fast site. That can get overwhelming pretty quickly which is why we recommend Trellis.
Extra settings that can offer a boost.
These settings will help to "power up" some of the settings we just covered. All of the settings in that list plus these boosters will help you boost viewability.
Disable the Adhesion Close button. Keep that highly viewable ad unit in view for the entire session duration.
Are you running ads on your Web Stories? Chances are they are pulling down your viewability down and are not earning you very much. Disabling those will boost overall advertiser spend on ads that will make you more.