How to Improve Ad Viewability: A Practical DV360 Guide

Most viewability problems aren't mysteries. They come from a handful of causes: placements that sit where nobody looks, inventory that can't be measured, creatives that load too late, and line items set up to chase the cheapest impressions. Fix those and the number moves.

The catch is cost. Better viewability usually means paying more per thousand impressions, so you also need a simple way to tell when that trade is worth making.

What is ad viewability, and what counts as a viewable impression?

Viewability tells you whether an ad had a real chance to be seen. An impression is counted as soon as the ad is served, but it only counts as viewable if enough of it appears on screen for long enough.

The standard comes from the Media Rating Council (MRC) and the IAB, and Google's Active View measurement in DV360 follows it:

Your viewability rate is viewable impressions divided by measurable impressions. That second part matters. If Active View can't measure an impression, it isn't counted as viewable or non-viewable. It simply drops out of the calculation. You'll find these and other terms in our programmatic glossary.

Why does viewability matter if you pay for every impression?

It matters precisely because you pay for every impression. DV360 line items are bought on impressions served, seen or not. Every non-viewable impression is money that never had a chance to work.

The simplest way to see the cost is viewable CPM (vCPM), the price of 1,000 impressions that were actually viewable:

vCPM = CPM / viewability rate

Here is an illustrative example for a ₹5 lakh display budget. The CPMs sit inside the indicative ranges on our site, and the viewability rates are examples, not benchmarks.

The cheapest CPM delivered fewer viewable ads than the filtered line, and cost more for each one that was seen. The PG deal delivered the fewest viewable impressions, but in a context and placement you chose. For a launch, or for a trust-heavy category like banking, that can still be the right buy. The point is to compare like with like: on vCPM, and on what you need each impression to do.

Viewability also feeds everything downstream. Unseen ads can't build recall, can't be clicked and can't drive a sale, so low viewability quietly drags down your programmatic advertising ROI.

How do you check viewability in DV360?

Start with four Active View metrics, available in standard DV360 reports:

• Active View: Eligible Impressions, impressions with a creative format and tag that could be measured.
• Active View: Measurable Impressions, impressions that Active View actually measured.
• Active View: Viewable Impressions, measured impressions that met the standard.
• Active View: % Viewable Impressions, viewable impressions as a share of measurable ones.

Read the measurable rate before the viewable rate. A line showing 75% viewability on a small share of measurable impressions tells you very little. Low measurability usually has a plain cause. In-app inventory from apps that don't use the IAB Tech Lab's Open Measurement SDK can't be measured by Active View. Creatives served through Campaign Manager 360 need Active View enabled on the matching CM360 placement. Some connected TV and older video inventory is only partly measurable too.

Break the numbers down by site and app, by creative size and by line item. Our guide to building DV360 campaign reports shows how to set these up so they arrive on a schedule.

If you also use a verification partner such as Integral Ad Science (IAS) or DoubleVerify, expect its numbers to differ a little from Active View. Pick one source as the number you optimise against and stick with it for the whole campaign.

Which changes improve viewability the most?

These are the fixes that usually move the number, roughly in the order I'd try them.

1. Cut the worst placements. Sort your site and app report by viewable rate, but only judge placements with enough measurable impressions to mean something. A few hundred impressions is noise. Exclude the steady low performers and review again after a week.
2. Use predicted viewability targeting. In a DV360 line item or insertion order, viewability targeting lets you bid only on impressions whose predicted viewability clears a threshold, in steps from 10% to 90%. Start in the middle, around 50% or greater, and raise it only while delivery holds. High thresholds leave a small slice of inventory.
3. Or let automated bidding chase viewable impressions. DV360's brand bid strategies can optimise for viewable impressions, with an optional target viewable CPM, and video lines can optimise for completed in-view and audible impressions. Use either this or viewability targeting on a line item, not both. Google warns that combining Active View based bidding with viewability targeting can severely limit spend.
4. Choose positions people see. Position targeting covers on-screen position (above or below the fold) and position in content, such as in-article, in-feed or interstitial for display, and pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll for in-stream video. Not all inventory is labelled, so choosing only above the fold also drops unknown positions and can choke scale.
5. Rethink sizes. Units that sit inside the content, or stay on screen while people scroll, tend to be in view longer than a banner at the very top of a page that readers scroll past in a second. Treat that as a hypothesis and test it with a size breakdown in your own report.
6. Avoid tiny video players. For web and outstream video, video player size targeting helps you skip small players that rarely meet the standard. Outstream ads in DV360 serve only in the main body of the page, not in sidebars or footers.
7. Buy curated inventory for important bursts. With PG and private deals you choose the publisher, the section and the placement, and you can ask for placement-level viewability before you book. Article pages sometimes beat the homepage on viewability at a lower CPM, so ask for figures on both. Our premium publisher inventory page lists the OTT, news and DOOH deals we set up.
8. Make creatives light. A heavy HTML5 file that loads after the reader has scrolled past is served, counted and never seen. Keep file sizes well inside the publisher's specs, and check load time on a mid-range Android phone on mobile data, because that's how a large part of your audience will meet the ad.
9. Add pre-bid verification where it pays. IAS and DoubleVerify pre-bid filters in DV360 can screen for viewability and suspicious activity. They add a fee on top of media that depends on the controls you switch on. IAS pre-bid filtering doesn't cover YouTube inventory, where IAS offers post-campaign measurement only. Use them on open web lines, where the risk is highest.

For a wider weekly routine covering bids, audiences and pacing, see our DV360 optimisation checklist.

What about YouTube and connected TV?

Active View measures YouTube in-stream and display ads on the YouTube website and apps, using the same video standard as everywhere else. Viewability is rarely the weak point on YouTube. Completion rate and audience fit usually matter more.

Connected TV is different again. The ad plays full screen on the TV, and DV360 exempts CTV from video viewability targeting by default, so a viewability setting on a video line item doesn't block most CTV inventory. You can change this in the advertiser's targeting settings, but there's seldom a good reason to. Judge CTV on completion rate and on reach and frequency in DV360 instead.

How high should your viewability target be?

There is no single right number. Open web display, publisher deals, YouTube and CTV all behave differently, so one blanket target across channels will mislead you.

A practical approach:

1. Run the first week or two with light controls and record viewable and measurable rates by channel, site and size.
2. Set a target for each channel a little above that baseline, plus an exclusion floor for individual placements.
3. Compare options on vCPM, not CPM. A control that raises CPM by 40% but doubles viewability is a saving.
4. Stop pushing when reach suffers. Very high thresholds shrink the pool, push CPMs up and can concentrate delivery on fewer people.

Viewability is a cost question as much as a quality one, which is why it sits naturally next to the tactics in our guide to reducing CPM in programmatic advertising.

What mistakes should you avoid?

• Trusting a viewable rate built on a low measurable rate. Fix measurement first.
• Stacking controls. Predicted viewability targeting, viewable-impression bidding and above-the-fold-only targeting together can leave a line item unable to spend.
• Excluding sites on tiny samples. You'll cut good placements by accident.
• Treating viewable as noticed. Half an ad on screen for one second is a minimum, not proof of attention. Pair viewability with completion rates, reach and, for bigger campaigns, a brand lift study.
• Buying cheap context. Sites built mainly to carry ads can post decent viewability with little real attention. Site lists and context controls help, and our guide to contextual targeting explains how to use them.

Next step

If you'd rather not tune Active View reports and targeting every week, our DV360 Managed Service includes brand safety and viewability controls, daily pacing checks and weekly optimisation. Share your brief or media plan and we'll suggest where the viewability gains are likely to be.