• Research: Video Ad Completion and Fraud Rates Improve

    Video ad tech provider Extreme Reach has released its Q1 ’18 Video Advertising Benchmark Report, which shows improvements in video ad viewable completion and fraud rates. The video ad completion rate increased 10% YOY in Q1 to above 75% for the first time. Premium media sites saw an 88% viewable completion rate, with media aggregators achieving a 69% rate. Extreme Reach attributed the improvement in the premium media rate to unskippable connected TV ads.

    Meanwhile, ad fraud showed strong improvement, with general invalid traffic (GIVT) dropping over 32% YOY in Q1 to 3.7% and just 2.2% on premium sites and 7.1% on media aggregators. Premium media sites accounted for 71% of impression, with media aggregators accounting for 29%.

    Six-second ads also gained strongly in Q1 ’18, jumping 300% to account for 2.8% of all ads, with 30-second and 15-second spots about evenly splitting the rest of the impressions. Mobile video had 33% of all impressions followed by connected TV, which had 31%.

    Click-through rates also improved in Q1 after several quarters of declines. For the first time mobile had the highest CTR, edging out tablets. Desktops, which have had the highest CTR for the past several quarters, fell behind tablets for the first time.

    The full interactive report can be viewed here.