Q Digital Advertising Index

Transcription

1 1 Q Digital Advertising Index

2 2 INTRODUCTION 2015 WILL BE REMEMBERED AS THE YEAR THE DIGITAL MARKETING INDUSTRY BECAME OBSESSED WITH QUALITY. After two decades of working to prove its long-term viability, the online advertising ecosystem has matured to a point where brands no longer need to be convinced that the web is worthy of their marketing budgets. Instead, many of our industry s most prominent members have shifted their attention to tackling challenges like viewability and bot traffic. In Q3, these issues dominated the conversation in trade journals and on convention stages, suggesting an unprecedented, industrywide commitment to ensuring that digital impressions will be seen by real human beings. AppNexus Q3 Index compiled from more than 3 trillion impressions available on our platform this past quarter shows exactly what happens when this commitment to quality is put into action. This year, AppNexus launched its industry-leading Inventory Quality (IQ) initiative to rid its platform of as much invalid traffic as possible through a series of new policies and aggressive enforcement. September 1 marked the third phase of the rollout of IQ, and the impact on Q3 data has been profound. Though the number of impressions traded on the platform declined in Q3, the benefits to buyers and sellers were clear: transacting exclusively on high-quality impressions results in platform-wide click-through rates, viewability rates, and CPMs all going through the roof, with tag-level CTR, viewability rates, and CPMs also increasing. The AppNexus Q3 Index uses data from over 1,400 buyers and sellers to provide an overview of the online advertising world as it stands today. By reading on, you will gain greater insight into the trends outlined above, learn which publisher categories enjoyed their strongest quarter of the year, and find out how America s most outspoken presidential candidate made his mark on Q3 digital advertising.

3 3 KEY FINDINGS Platform spend follows seasonal patterns: total global transactions dropped 3.5 percent from Q2, a dip that mirrors the one we saw in Q3 of Quality counts: by removing non-compliant inventory on a pre-bid basis, we helped our U.S. buyers increase click-through rates by 44 percent this quarter, while our publishers enjoyed a 255 percent bump in average CPMs. Viewability is on the rise: the IQ initiative spurred a 77 percent uptick in the platform s average viewability rate. Election season is heating up: Q3 saw a spike in the number of available impressions from U.S. publishers in the Law and Government category, a figure that climbed 245 percent in the weeks leading up to the first GOP debate. Other successful U.S. content categories: Real Estate (232 percent increase in available impressions from last quarter), Autos and Vehicles (84 percent), and Science (172 percent) publishers all posted their best quarter of 2015.

4 4 PLATFORM BUYING COOLS FOR THE SUMMER Marketers typically view Q3 as a chance to roll back expenditures in advance of the hectic holiday season, and this year was no different. On a daily basis, buyers spent on average 3.1 percent less than the previous quarter, which falls in line with the slight decline that s typical during the summer months. On the bright side, global platform spend was up 36 percent year-over-year, and a staggering 271 percent from Q3 of This presents yet another data point suggesting that advertisers are devoting more of their resources to digital with each passing year. Spending remained relatively stable despite the sharp drop in available impressions precipitated by the rollout of IQ proof positive that the invalid traffic wiped from the platform wasn t worth much to buyers, anyway (prior to September 1, only 3 percent of buyer spend was going to low-quality inventory; after September 1, that number dropped to 0). With these bad impressions out of the picture, clients were able to devote an even greater portion of their budgets to delivering high-quality ad experiences to their target consumers. U.S. PLATFORM SPEND:

5 5 APPNEXUS IQ CREATES FEWER IMPRESSIONS, HIGHER PRICES, AND BETTER PERFORMANCE Q3 proves that media buyers are willing to pay a premium for high-quality inventory. Enforcing quality standards reduced the volume of advertising available on the AppNexus platform, which assured clients that the remaining impressions would be well worth the money they spent on them. As a result of IQ, U.S. click-through rates jumped from percent to percent this quarter an increase of more than 44 percent. From there, the laws of supply and demand reigned supreme. With publishers offering fewer, higher-quality impressions and marketers clamoring for even greater access to digital audiences, prices went through the roof. In fact, U.S. CPMs hit an all-time high of $1.76 on September 29, with buyers paying an average CPM of $0.64 to reach consumers on the platform this quarter. If you re scoring at home, that s an increase of 255 percent from Q2. When our industry works together to stamp out bad actors and increase the quality of digital advertising, everybody wins. U.S. PLATFORM CPM:

6 6 THE SUMMER OF VIEWABILITY The past several years have seen a remarkable turnaround in the way the sell side thinks about viewability. Though some publishers have been skeptical about losing revenues from non-viewable inventory, a recent study conducted by AppNexus in partnership with Circle Research and WARC revealed that well over half of publishers think they will ultimately benefit from guaranteeing advertisers that people will see their ads. While all ads on the AppNexus platform have the potential to be viewed by consumers, not all ads ultimately pass through the viewable range of a user s monitor (if, for example, an ad is placed at the bottom of a page, and a user doesn t scroll down far enough to see it, that ad isn t viewable ). But publishers are working to expand their stockpile of viewable inventory and this along with the stark increase in platform-wide quality that came with the rollout of AppNexus IQ resulted in a 77 percent increase in viewability rates this quarter. VIEWABILITY RATE OF INVENTORY PURCHASED IN Q3

7 7 THE TRUMP EFFECT: DIGITAL ADVERTISING EDITION While the losers and haters might not like it, real estate mogul and presidential hopeful Donald Trump made as much of a splash on the ad tech marketplace this summer as he did on the campaign trail. In the weeks leading up to early August s opening Republican presidential debates, we saw a 245 percent increase in the number of impressions available from publishers in the Law and Government category. By all indications, the nationalistic bombast that garnered record television ratings for the debates also drove more traffic to Law and Government publishers than they had seen in any prior quarter this year. In all seriousness, the 2016 presidential election cycle figures to be a breakout moment for online advertising, with media tracking firms estimating that we ll see upwards of $1 billion in digital political spending over the course of the coming year. AVAILABLE IMPRESSIONS IN THE LAW AND GOVERNMENT CONTENT CATEGORY IN 2015

8 8 BUYERS REALIZE GREAT VALUE IN Q3 Though advertisers tend to think people are too busy going on vacation and enjoying the sunshine to consume their messages in Q3, we ve actually found that people still spend plenty of time on their devices during this time of the year. As such, the quarter s stable supply and lowered demand gives media buyers an annual opportunity to get more bang for their buck. This trend materialized in Q3 with a growing gap between the amount of money buyers bid for an impression and the price they wound up paying to receive it. In Q3, the average bid CPM was just 35 percent of the average bid CPM buyers were willing to pay on the platform, indicating that advertisers got a bargain by purchasing impressions for much less than they otherwise would have been willing to pay for them. For comparison, buyers paid 41 percent of their average bid prices in Q3 of last year. AVERAGE CPM COMPARED TO BID CPM:

9 9 EDUCATION PUBLISHERS ENJOY A BACK-TO-SCHOOL RUSH Students return to school is one of the signature events of early fall, and the Education publisher category benefited from this lifecycle moment. The Education category, which saw its number of available impressions hit a lull during the summer, started to pick back up again as August turned into September. As a result, these publishers provided 69 percent more impressions in September than they did in July. AVAILABLE IMPRESSIONS IN THE EDUCATION CONTENT CATEGORY IN 2015

10 10 SCIENCE SOARS IN Q3 Q3 was a great time to be a science enthusiast. A NASA spacecraft visited Pluto for the first time in July, while September featured a total lunar eclipse (a.k.a. The Supermoon ) and the discovery of water on Mars. All of these developments led to a big increase in traffic to Science publishers, whose available impressions peaked at 250 million shortly after NASA announced its big Mars water discovery on September 28. The Health (44 percent increase in available impressions from Q2), Autos and Vehicles (84 percent), and Real Estate (232 percent) categories also boasted more impressions in Q3 than in any prior quarter this year. AVAILABLE IMPRESSIONS IN THE SCIENCE CONTENT CATEGORY IN 2015

11 11 METHODOLOGY Our insights come from an internal analysis of aggregated global spending and pricing data collected from the 3,253,319,920,688 impressions made available on our platform in Q The AppNexus Q3 Index uses data from over 1,400 buyers and sellers. Powered by AppNexus AppNexus Inc. All Rights Reserved.