Use the Total Visibility Dashboard

Total Visibility Dashboard

Use the Total Visibility dashboard to enable insight into the quality and cost of your programmatic supply paths with near real-time financial reporting.

To access Total Visibility:

1. Login to IAS Signal

2. Click Dashboards

3. Select Total Visibility.

Total Visibility Scorecards

Total Visibility scorecards highlight important metrics to monitor: 

• Total Tracked Ads

• Total Spend 

• Total Flagged Spend

• Quality Spend

• qCPM

• eCPM

These metrics tie in impression cost with media quality to help you understand the value received from your programmatic buys.

Metrics (see Total Visibility Metrics Glossary for more information):

• Total Tracked Ads: total number of programmatic ads monitored by Total Visibility

• Total Spend: total cost of programmatic ads monitored by Total Visibility 

• Total Flagged Spend: total amount of money spent on unviewable, brand unsafe, and invalid traffic

• Quality Spend: Percentage of Total Spend that went towards the purchase of brand-safe, viewable, and invalid traffic-free media

• qCPM vs. eCPM: The goal is for qCPM (Quality CPM) to equal eCPM (Effective CPM). qCPM is the rate paid for impressions that were viewable, brand-safe, and fraud-free. The qCPM delta, or difference between qCPM and eCPM, represents the CPM of flagged media. 

Track Flagged Media

Flagged media are ads deemed as non-quality by IAS. Multiple violations on a single impression are only counted once in the total so the total may not be the sum of the individual violations. 

There are three different types of flagged media metrics that are tracked across impressions and spend.

• Unviewable

• Brand Unsafe 

• Invalid Traffic (IVT)

Summary Graphs

Graphs Explained:

• qCPM vs eCPM: Keep an eye on the delta between these two metrics - the smaller the delta, the less wasted spend. 

• Flagged Media Trends: Track the percentage of spend flagged as unviewable, unsafe, or invalid traffic over time.

• Quality Spend by SSP: See which SSPs provide high quality at an efficient CPM. Hover over the bubble to see the total amount spent on that SSP - the larger the bubble, the more spent. 

• Quality Spend: Monitor the portion of your investment going to quality impressions over time.

• Take Rate: Available for DSPs that share cost breakdowns. Media cost is the amount of spend that leaves the DSP for all the SSPs. DSP Take can include other 3rd party fees if reported by the DSP.

Supply Path View

Available for an additional cost, Supply Path provides granular insight into every hop of the programmatic supply chain.

Click the DSP to expand all the SSPs that the DSP bought from, on behalf of the advertiser. Also, click the SSP to see all the publishers who sold impressions. Finally, click on a publisher to show all the domains in which impressions were served.

Use the filters to drill down to focus on specific dimensions. For example, choose the 'unviewable' option in the Media Quality filter to see the supply paths that contributed to impressions that were not seen, and the correlating CPMs and spend.

Filters Explained:

• DSP: Allows you to focus on a single or a combination of DSPs. 

• IAS Campaigns: Choose one or multiple ADVIDs to see data from an IAS campaign perspective.

• DSP Campaigns: Most DSPs provide IAS with Campaign IDs. To include Campaign names, share a Campaign ID-to-Name mapping spreadsheet with your account team.

• DSP Line Items: Ideally, optimizations are done at the line item level because that controls targeting in most DSPs. In order to include Line Item names, share a Line Item ID- to- Name mapping spreadsheet with your account team. For DV360, DSP Campaigns and Line Items are identical.

• PMP: See the financials, quality metrics, and supply path of Deals. To include PMP names, share a Deal ID-to-Name mapping spreadsheet with your account team. 

• SSP: Drill down to a single or more SSPs/Exchanges.

• Media Quality: See the impressions that Quality or flagged as Unviewable, Brand Unsafe, or Invalid Traffic.

• Media Type: Different media types can have varying CPMs. Use this filter to focus on Display, Video, or Unknown.

• Device Type: Classifications are received from DSP which include:

  • Desktop,

  • Smartphone,

  • Tablet,

  • CTV,

  • Other

Comparisons View

Use the Comparisons view to see high and low performers within a hop of the supply chain or dimension. The tabs include:

• DSPs,

• SSPs,

• Publishers,

• Domains,

• IAS Campaigns,

• DSP Campaigns,

• PMPs 

The tables below the tab are initially sorted based on Total Spend, but you can click the column name to sort via any table metric. 

In the Domains tab, Paths allows you to understand whether specific paths perform better than others. The 'Path comparison view' shows DSP > SSP > Publisher combinations that allow you to see and analyze domains.

For ID-based dimensions like PMPs, you can provide an ID-to-name mapping spreadsheet (available from DSP reporting) to your account team to add friendly names in the dashboard.

Benchmarks

For the supply path and comparisons view, the following tags are triggered when certain thresholds are hit: 

• Unviewable: at least 30% of spend is not seen

• Unsafe: at least 2.5% of spend is not safe according to your brand safety risk thresholds

• IVT: at least 1% of spend is invalid traffic

Optimizations

After you understand how to navigate the dashboard, you can act on the various insights. Below are optimizations clients perform based on Total Visibility data:

• curate SSPs

• adjust inventory

• optimize PMPs 

Curate SSPs

Consolidate bidding on high quality SSPs

This reduces the chances of bidding against yourself which is inevitably occurs when purchasing from over 30 sources. There can also be economies of scale for fees as media buying power increases with a more limited supply chain. 

Adjust Inventory

Use in-flight campaign data to activate ideal prebid segments and fine tune lists

Direct spend towards or away from inventory while the campaign is in flight for cost efficiency and waste prevention. Additionally, you can confirm your partners are adhering to your set inclusion and exclusion lists.

Leverage IAS recommendations to activate valuable prebid segments based on your buying behavior

Work with the IAS Insights team to understand which contextual segments can help achieve specific KPIs like viewability, conversion rate, and scale.

Optimize PMPs

Ensure cost and quality KPIs are being met

If a domain is not performing well, work with the SSP or publisher to create a PMP with quality KPI thresholds. If a PMP does not perform well, determine if Open Exchange performs better. If so, stop purchasing from PMP.

Case Study

Nestlé Finds the True Cost of Flagged Media

Insight

During a live Nestlé campaign, IAS consistently flagged a single domain as brand unsafe. With Total Visibility, Nestle saw 3.77% of unsafe impressions represented 9.23% of their total media spend.

Result

Within six hours of this realization, Nestlé excluded the domain and directed spend away from brand-damaging placements and redirected money to safe media.