This is a guest blog post written by ad quality and ad security solution AdSecure. One of the factors that contributes to the success of any digital ad campaign is compliance to industry standards. However, manually checking the compliance of every ad, image and campaign can be daunting, especially when dealing with hundreds or thousands of campaigns.

This is why EXADS, through its integration with AdSecure, can ensure that your ad campaigns are aligned with the standards set by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the advertising business organization that develops industry standards, guidelines and best practices for digital ads; the Coalition for Better Ads; and Google, which owns the world's biggest ad browser, Chrome, with a market share of 65.27% as of 2021. These industry bodies and Google, have set certain standards that should be abided by in order to:

• Give the best, optimized user experience.
• Ensure that ads are displayed correctly for better user engagement and click through rate.
• Avoid heavy ads that can slow down a user’s device.

AdSecure offers a complete range of industry leading solutions to protect ad networks and publishers from all forms of malvertising, but in this article we will focus on AdSecure’s ad quality detections: IAB Standards detection and Heavy Ad detection. Let’s look at them in more detail:

IAB Standards detection

When digital ads are compliant to the IAB standards, they are optimized to provide the best experience for the end user. As a result, such ads consistently drive higher levels of user interest and click rates and can be a key differentiator between a higher or lower conversion rate for digital ad campaigns. 

In fact, in AdSecure’s 2021 Violations Report,1.6% of AdSecure’s total violation scans detected poor IAB Standard ad quality. Below you can see how the IAB detections were spread across each quarter in 2021:

Thanks to AdSecure’s IAB standard detection, clients saw a substantial improvement in Q3 & Q4. Compared to Q1 & Q2 when 1 in 40 campaigns was not aligned with the IAB, in the last two quarters of the year this had dropped significantly. 

By using this AdSecure detection, publishers and ad networks were able to notify their advertiser clients of the need to review their ads and align them with IAB standards.

How does AdSecure’s IAB Standards detection work?

AdSecure’s IAB Standards widget and related detections allow you to verify that your ads remain compliant with the IAB recommendations on the following aspects:

• Ad Dimension: Verifies that ad dimensions do not exceed the IAB recommendations for specific sizes.
• Ad Weight: Verifies that an ad’s size meets the IAB recommendations for maximum KB both on initial load and sub load.
• Ad Request Count: Verifies that ads meet the IAB maximum recommendation of no more than 10 requests.
• Ad File Compression: Verifies that all assets are compressed as per the IAB recommendation on file compression.

How can ad networks and publishers use it?

With the AdSecure integration, EXADS clients can measure the performance of their ads against the IAB standards by reviewing the details shown in the IAB Standards widget on any AdSecure report where a relevant ad has been analyzed. In addition, EXADS users can apply IAB Standards alerts to their projects, all API and quick analyses in order to be notified instantly when an ad does not meet one or more of the above standards.

Heavy Ad Detection

Heavy ads can get blocked by the Chrome browser. To be classed as heavy, an ad will have the following characteristics:

• Consumes more than 4MB of network bandwidth
• Uses CPU for 15 seconds or more within a 30 second window
• Uses CPU for 60 seconds or more in total

In 2020, to block resource-intensive ads that consume too much bandwidth and use up the user device’s CPU power, Google implemented the Heavy Ad Intervention on Chrome 84 and above. According to this new policy, when a Heavy Ad is detected, it gets blocked by Google. 

When blocked by Google, the ad zone is populated with an error message, resulting in a poor user experience and disrupting a site’s quality. This negatively impacts both the publisher site’s performance and traffic volumes, and the advertiser’s investment.

How does AdSecure’s Heavy Ad detection work?

AdSecure’s Heavy Ad detection automatically audits and validates all of an ad network's ads being served to its publisher and partner network. The detection ensures that all ads meet Google’s Heavy Ad Intervention Ads Standards, and notifies the ad network of the campaign that has a heavy ad so that the advertiser can be asked to submit the ad at the correct weight. 

Conclusion

By serving ads that are fully aligned with the industry standards you are offering not only a better end user experience, but a more effective monetization for your advertiser clients which in turn benefits you as an ad network. In addition, you can ensure that your publisher clients will only show quality ads, which enhances your reputation with your publisher network.

Get in touch with EXADS to learn more about our AdSecure integration covering ad quality, ad safety solutions and a large range of violation detections which are categorized as user experience, user security and user advisory. Together with AdSecure, EXADS can help you deliver the best possible ad serving experience.