I attended a great webinar the other day held by attributionmodeling.com and C3 Metrics. Some really insightful information from studies they have run:

• 37% of brand term conversions get credit from other distribution channels efforts due to current last click attribution.
• 44% of the conversion funnel starts with a view from display or social
• 64% of all display ads are not actually seen.
• Only 88% of all impressions are fully loaded
• 42% of those impressions are fully seen (this includes iframes)

To validate these metrics back in June the IAB released an article about how publishers, agencies and leading marketers have agreed on guiding principles of digital media. The key pull out in relation to the above metrics:

“Today we count “served impressions” as recorded by ad servers.  Often, ad units are not in a viewable space to the end-user or fail to fully load on the screen – potentially resulting in substantial over-counting of impressions. Viewable exposures are increasingly the norm across other media and better address the needs of brand marketers.”

Next time you’re negotiating rates for your display buys or looking at how your attributing conversions you should take into account the above.