7 ways to minimise ad impression discrepancies
With the digital channels and technology evolving and getting smarter day by day, each impression is valuable and at risk too. As a standard practice in the digital advertising world, there are independent ad servers for advertisers and publishers to manage and monitor their campaign. This approach provides with numerous gains for each party, but since they calculate impressions at different points i.e. an advertiser counts impressions when an ad is delivered and publishers count when there is an ad request, the reporting does not match.
The digital advertising ecosystem lacks a common system to coordinate, manage and report data about impressions, ad viewability and verify fraud. This inability of digital systems to coordinate between multiple systems leads to incorrect revenues for publishers and advertisers and even the third parties. This difference is known as impression discrepancy.
Since the publisher delivery numbers are usually more than the agency reporting numbers the difference of a range of 5–10% is considered as acceptable. If the difference exceeds beyond 10%, the publisher would have to look into the concerns causing the difference and may have to ask third-party agencies to take care of the impressions missed in their reports.
