Client Metric Definitions
Promoted follows IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and MRC (Media Rating Council) standards for "Impression," "Click," (aka Navigate), and "Video View" for all client metrics in reporting, optimization, analytics, and ad billing. This is true for all reporting, including organic metrics, even if you do not use ads and will never use ads.
Why Ad Metrics for Non-Ads?
The concept of a "fair and consistent" definition of user engagement across different websites and apps has decades of precedence and best practice. IAB definitions are used by all major digital ad networks and companies like Google and Meta (note: Meta uses a different standard of "greater than zero pixel and greater than zero second" impression). The IAB and MRC are the industry standards organizations that define and arbitrate the definitions of ad metrics. Clean, consistent, well-understood client metrics can be useful everywhere, not just for ads.
What are the definitions?
Promoted collects "raw" signals from user clients from our Metrics SDK. These signals may be duplicated, fractional, or generated by non-users. Promoted's servers process these raw signals into sanitized, standard metrics in combination with some signals from our server-side Delivery SDK.
Promoted may have additional metrics that elaborate on these definitions, like "impression dwell time," "multiclicks," and "in-unit clicks," or versions of these metrics without invalid traffic filters applied. Unless otherwise specified, the following are the definitions of impressions and clicks if reported to end-users.
Impression Definition
Impressions are indications that a user has consciously seen a listing sufficiently enough to be influenced by it or take action on it, like a click. Clicks on an insertion generate an impression, even if the below criteria are not met.
- 50% of the listing's pixels are visible in the browser window for a continuous 1 second.
- For larger listings (those greater than 242,000 pixels), 30% of the listing’s pixels are visible in the browser window.
- For in-stream video listings, 50% of the ad’s pixels must be visible in the browser window for a continuous 2 seconds. (this is called an MRC Video View)
Click Definition
Clicks navigate a user from a listing to a target destination about that listing and indicate the user's explicit intent to select that listing. Per IAB guidance, clicks are "Click Through" or "Navigates" (as opposed to "In-Unit Clicks") and use the One-Click-Per-Impression Method. Internally, Promoted labels "clicks" as "Navigates" to better align with modern mobile app design, which may use taps, swipes, or other gestures. You may see the name "NAVIGATE" used synonymously as "click" in Promoted's systems.
Join Window Times
Promoted's systems must wait a fixed amount of time before deciding to emit a metric. Streaming metrics may have some error due to out-of-order or delayed signal transmission. After a 24 hour settlement period, Promoted's metrics are finalized.
Deduplication
Clicks and impressions uniquely correspond with a "display decision" to show a listing, which Promoted calls an "insertion." For ads, insertions correspond to ad auctions and potentially billable events.
Your app or website controls when there is a new "display decision" regarding auto-refreshing in time or navigation, for example, returning to a previous page in a search result paging sequence or scrolling up and down. If there is no new decision to show something new, there is no new insertion, and there can be no new impression or click. The IAB recommends "reasonableness" and consideration of user initiation and intent.
Promoted does not always have an insertion ID for impressions and clicks to deduplicate by. In this case, Promoted makes a best-effort attribution to an insertion, if it exists, and deduplicates by the closest approximation of an insertion decision.
The deduplication key is:
(insertionID, contentID, anonUserID, viewType, viewID, cacheBuster)
If the Promoted SDKs are correctly and fully installed, then insertionID is sufficient to deduplicate. Otherwise, other IDs may be used to deduplicate. In very rare cases, if there is no insertionID, there may be multiple impressions with the same join key due to limits in time processing.
"cacheBuster" is a term the IAB uses to make unique cached contents for counting purposes. It can be a random number. It is a way for platforms using Promoted to count more unique clicks and impressions than would otherwise be counted.
Invalid Traffic Filtering
Promoted follows the MRC: "reported activity should be free of invalid traffic." Metrics explicitly identified as invalid using the ignore_usage SDK flags, like internal employees or automated testing, are not counted. External user traffic explicitly labeled as a bot is not counted. Traffic that is actually bot or invalid traffic but self-reports as valid may be excluded; Promoted makes a best-effort to detect invalid traffic using industry-standard practices.
References
https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/MobileWebMeasurementGuidelines_April2016.pdf
https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/click-measurement-guidelines2009.pdf
http://mediaratingcouncil.org/MRC%20Invalid%20Traffic%20Detection%20and%20Filtration.pdf
http://mediaratingcouncil.org/062816%20Mobile%20Viewable%20Guidelines%20Final.pdf
Updated 7 months ago