Digital Campaign Benchmarks: How Are Your Campaigns Performing Versus the Canadian Norms?

• For Advertisers, knowing your ads had the opportunity to be seen by the right target audience, in the right geography, in a brand safe environment and free of non-human traffic is critical to ensure your digital investment is well spent.

• For Agencies, ensuring your media planning and execution delivers on client objectives is an absolute must to retain and grow business.

• For Publishers, validating the quality and value of your inventory helps ensure you attract greater investment from media buyers.

To help guide the industry to better understand campaign delivery on the whole, Comscore releases industry benchmarks from the more than 200 billion impressions it measures across the globe from its Comscore validated Campaign Essentials® (vCE) service. Industry benchmarks can be used to help set delivery expectations and provide a powerful indicator of relative campaign performance, but it’s important to remember that there is no normal when it comes to in-view and in-target rates. ‘Normal’ can vary based on a number of factors such as campaign objective, size of target, placement and verticals. Further, as explained in our whitepaper Lessons Learned in Digital Advertising, 100% in-view and 100% in-target delivery is not a realistic expectation for a number of reasons including technology limitations, data availability and end-user behavior.

Comscore has developed an Infographic that illustrates specific North American Benchmarks detailing the In-Target and In-View norms for the US and Canada as well as specific Canadian Industries (Consumer Packaged Goods, Finance and Retail).

Download the full infographic

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Comscore vCE, which provides campaign measurement in 43 markets, gives the unique ability to understand campaign performance on a global scale.

Global In-View Benchmarks
Analysis of the Comscore vCE campaign benchmarks revealed that the majority of display ads never had the chance to be seen by consumers in nearly all global regions, with only Asia Pacific seeing viewability rates creep slightly above 50%.

Global In-Target Benchmarks
When looking at in-target delivery the story was no better, with just 37% to 44% of display ads reaching their intended audience across regions.

It’s important to remember that a large driver of variation with in-target delivery is the composition of the target itself. The more targeting variables used, such as age, gender and other demographics, the harder it is to reach the target. It is also important to note that impressions that land outside of the target audience may also deliver value to the campaign by reaching and influencing other consumers. Thus, not all impressions that fall outside of the target should be viewed as wasted impressions.

North American Deep Dive:
Taking a closer look at the North American market revealed that in-target delivery rates ranged from 45.7% in Canada to 42.6% in the US, while in-view rates ranged from 47.5% in Canada and 45.7% in the US. This means that in the US and Canada more than half of ad impressions did not deliver the opportunity to be seen and therefore did not have the chance to make an impact on the consumer. There are several possible reasons for the differences with In-View/In-Target rates in Canada compared to the US. The degree of specificity in targeting strategies may be one. The sheer size of the US market, as well as the increased adoption of programmatic are additional considerations. Regardless, the investment in the Canadian digital advertising ecosystem continues to grow, which further underscores the greater need for increased efficiency, transparency and trust, especially as programmatic trading continues to gain traction in markets not only in Canada but across the globe.