Active View is how Google AdSense measures Viewable Impressions. An Active View Viewable Impression is one that appeared at least 50% onscreen for at least one second.
Viewable Impressions came about because studies have shown that many of the ads which are loaded offscreen are never actually seen by anyone. This is because people don’t necessarily scroll down to the bottom of every webpage they visit, but the below the fold ads load anyway.
This problem created waste for advertisers who ran (and paid for) ads that were never seen by anyone. These ads are also a problem for publishers as ads slow down webpages and drive away users (and unviewed ads don’t bring in much money).
Viewable impressions are the advertising industries way of combatting this problem.
How do viewable ad impressions work?
Where possible ads impressions are checked by ad platforms to see whether they are onscreen.
If this can be confirmed by the ad platforms program (in this case Active View), then those impressions are marked as being “Viewable”.
As a publisher using AdSense, you can see the percentage of how many of your ads impressions are “Active View Viewable”. This is important because these ad impressions are worth more than non-viewable impressions.
This is both because these ads tend to perform better than ads that no one sees (and so earn a higher CPM), but also because advertisers can buy viewable ad impressions at a higher CPM.
Note: Just because an ad impression is not marked as viewable, that does not mean it’s not viewable. If an ad’s viewability cannot be verified, it will also not be marked as viewable.
Summary
Find out more
- Viewable Ad Impressions Definition
- Viewability Calculator
- vCPM (Viewable Cost Per Thousand)
- Above the Fold Definition