As a prequel to AdSecure’s soon to be released Violations Report Q1 & Q2, we looked at whether ad campaigns were aligned with the IAB industry standards. This was carried out using AdSecure's IAB Standards detection tool that scans ads to verify that the ads remain compliant with the industry standard IAB recommendations. During Q1 and Q2 of 2021, AdSecure detected that 1 in 40 (2.4%) of all scans revealed ad campaigns were not meeting the IAB Standards. Out of those 2.4% of scans, the following graph shows the percentage detections related to each IAB Standard detection:

Insights: Ad campaigns aligned to the IAB standards lead to higher levels of user engagement and overall conversion, meaning that these standards play a key role in maximising revenue for each campaign. 

Website performance can be heavily impacted if industry advertising standards are not met. It creates a bad user experience and end users are less likely to click on the ad, affecting publisher eCPMs. 

Additionally, now that Google has added web content performance into it’s SEO rankings, monitoring for low performing ad content can help publishers ensure they avoid SEO penalties in the future. The weight of ad creatives is also important, because fast loading ‘light’ ads create a better end user experience and keep Publishers in line with Google’s Chrome web browser which unloads ads that use excessive amounts of a user’s bandwidth and device CPU. Unloaded ads show the following message within the Publishers ad zone where the ad should be:

This can also happen with HTML/Iframe campaigns where the creatives are not meeting IAB standards.

AdSecure’s IAB Standards detection tool is used by publishers and ad networks to identify non aligned campaigns in order to stop the campaigns before they cause publishers problems, and are a way for ad networks to contact advertisers to inform them to resubmit creatives in order to meet the industry standards and help them maximise their campaign revenues.