IAB Releases Digital Video In-Stream Ad Metrics Guidelines

The Internet Advertising Bureau yesterday released its latest guidelines on the reporting metrics for digital video in-stream ads. The standards, created by the IAB’s Digital Video Committee comprised of 145 leading interactive companies, cover the following four types of digital video ad formats:

*Linear Video Ad With or Without Companion Ad
*Linear Video Interactive Ad
*Non-linear Overlay Ad
*Non-linear Non-Overlay Ad

For both linear video ads (usually referring to the pre-roll/mid-roll types) and non-linear ones (the overlay types in most cases), the standards call for capturing not only the quantitative aspects of the ad exposure, such as impression count, click through rate, total time spent viewing, and percent complete, but also the qualitative aspects that are called other events in the guideline. Other events include audio mute/un-mute, click behaviors (pause, resume, rewind), and viewing actions (collapse or expand).

We hail the release of these metrics reporting guidelines by IAB as the organization’s another contribution to the online digital video advertising industry, which we forecast to generate more than $4.8 billion in revenue from in-stream ads in 2012.