Active View is a technology on YouTube and certain Google Display Network websites and apps that allows Google Ads to determine if your ad is viewable by potential customers. This article summarizes the methodology and measurement standards of the Active View technology for your display, video, and mobile app ads across Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform (Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360), and Google Ad Manager.
Learn more about Understanding viewability and Active View reporting metrics.
On this page
- Benefits of Active View
- How Active View works
- Active View logs, data retention, and traffic filtration
- Eligibility and requirements for Active View
- Considerations around Active View
Benefits of Active View
- Understand ad viewability: Active View metrics allow you to get insights into how often your ad appears in a position on a webpage, device, or app that people can view.
- Optimize campaign and ad performance: With the Active View reporting metrics and measurement signals, you can adjust your campaign settings to help better optimize your campaign and ad performance.
How Active View works
Google created Active View as part of the Brand Activate Initiative to measure viewable impressions based on Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council (MRC) standards:
- Display ads require a minimum 50% of ad pixels in view for a minimum of one continuous second.
- Video in-stream ads require a minimum 50% in view for a minimum of 2 seconds of continuous ad playback.
Viewability measurements help determine whether your ad appears within the browser viewport for a specific amount of time with 2 important factors:
- What portion of your ad appears in a viewable space on screen
- How long that portion of your ad remains visible
These factors are what Active View reports look at, as well as other data about the viewability and measurability of your ads for each site, placement, and domain used in your campaigns. Active View uses image beacons or measurement codes as a tracking asset for sending viewability information back to Google servers.
Active View technology and methodology
The Active View measurement methodology is purely based on the recorded viewability of measured impressions. The measurement code is built into Google Ad tags and software development kits (SDKs), so you don’t need to do anything while Google controls the measurement process.
Active View uses a measurement code to determine ad visibility and return the information to Google’s servers. This process performs measurement on 3 required buckets:
- Viewable impressions
- Non-viewable impressions
- Non-measurable impressions
Note: Other required metrics are represented by the respective platform and computed off of the 3 required buckets. For example, Campaign Manager 360 metrics are noted within its own DOM, since Active View doesn’t have its own reporting platform.
Display ads
When an ad loads through Google Ad tags, the Active View measurement code executes logic to determine whether it can measure viewability. On modern browsers, Active View uses the Intersection Observer Web API, while Element.getClientBoundingRect for older browsers.
If Active View can’t perform measurement, a pingback is sent to Google servers to indicate an unmeasurable impression, and no further monitoring occurs. If the Active View code determines that the ad is measurable, it monitors the ad's position on the browser, as well as events like scrolling, resizing, and tab switches. As soon as viewable impression criteria are met, a pingback is sent to record a viewable impression. If an impression becomes viewable for a second time, Active View doesn't count a second viewable event.
Note: A cache busting ID is generated for each ad request in Google Ad tags. Active View measurement events include this cache busting when it’s sent back to Google servers. Google servers respond with “no-cache” to Active View measurement events to ensure browsers don’t cache the event. All measurement events are sent back to Google servers through HTTPS requests and routed to read-only logs with standard access controls.
Mobile app ads
For display ads served by Google Mobile Ads (GMA) SDK, the Active View measurement code can measure nearly 100% of impressions. It monitors and collects information of the position of the ad in the mobile app, as well as any mobile app events that might cause visibility change. As soon as viewable impression criteria are met, a pingback is sent to Active View logs to report it as viewable impression.
Video ads
Active View supports linear and nonlinear video ad measurement in Interactive Media Ads (IMA) SDKs for HTML5, Android, and iOS. YouTube players on web and mobile apps (iOS and Android) also have Active View support built-in and work the same way as IMA SDK.
For video in-stream ads, the Active View measurement code is built into IMA SDK and YouTube. Active View detects the video ad player position and the browser or app viewport information. It monitors the ad for the duration of video ad length, along with browser events (same events as for display ads) and video playback events that might cause visibility change, such as pause, resume, fullscreen, skip, and others. As soon as viewable impression criteria are met, a pingback is sent to Active View logs to report it is a viewable impression.
Note: The IMA SDK and YouTube web player don't support offline playback of in-stream video ads. YouTube mobile clients support offline playback, but these ads aren't eligible for Active View measurement. Also, Active View doesn't separate autoplay viewable counts from click-to-play counts for viewability reporting purposes on video.
Rich media expandable ads and large ads
For rich media expandable ads, Active View determines the viewability state based on the original unexpanded size while the ad is unexpanded. Active View continues measurement by looking at the expanded size definition if the ad expands before meeting the one-second criteria. This happens very rarely.
Example
The MRC Viewable Ad Impression Measurement Guidelines mandate a large size ad pixel threshold of 30% for certain large display ads. For ads greater than 242,500 pixels in size, Active View supports this 30% threshold across all desktop platforms.
Open Measurement Interface Definition (OMID) and Open Measurement SDK (OM SDK) support
Active View supports video and display ad measurement in applications that implement the Open Measurement Interface Definition (OMID) standard from the IAB Tech Lab, including the Open Measurement SDK (OM SDK). It uses OMID signals to detect ad position, application lifecycle events, and video playback events that can affect visibility. As soon as viewable impression criteria are met, a pingback is sent to Active View logs to report it is a viewable impression.
Active View measures OMID inventory only when the ad request or OpenRTB bid request declares OMID capability. It reports viewability in MRC-accredited reports only when the request includes an IAB Tech Lab certified partner ID. Metrics from non-certified integrations are either not reported or placed in a non-accredited classification.
Active View logs, data retention, and traffic filtration
Active View metrics are reported through front ends for AdSense, Google Ads, Google Ad Manager, Authorized Buyers, and Google Marketing Platform. Reports are also available through Ads Data Hub and from Google ad sales representatives.
Active View logs and data retention
Active View pingbacks contain the viewability measurement data sent from the measurement client (JavaScript or native SDK). The raw records are parsed and joined with the original ad requests and stored in joined Active View logs.
The raw viewability data is maintained for 30 days for reprocessing should a system issue be identified or some other need arises.
Active View traffic filtration
Invalid traffic (IVT) impressions are discounted before reporting any impression counts for Active View. This includes impressions counted in reports on total impressions, viewable impressions, and measurable impressions. Google employs techniques based on identifiers, activity, and patterns in log files to identify and filter known and suspected non-human activity. Google Ads server log files are marked for invalid events by the AdSpam team. These logs help ensure Active View reports only include clean traffic.
Google complies with both general and sophisticated invalid traffic (GIVT and SIVT) guidelines for all accredited products.
Non-human traffic
Non-human traffic, including robots and spiders, represents programmatic activity on a website, which may include:
- Making requests for web pages on the website and recursively following the links on the page to other pages within the website, including in many cases, the links to the ad servers.
- System monitoring tools designed to ensure the website functions properly and content indexing or retrieving processes such as those used by search engines to populate their databases.
Google performs the following procedures to identify robotic traffic:
- Specific identification: Google uses a single-pass specific identification approach for filtration of robot activity within Ad Manager, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ads.
- User agents are compared to a list of known robot strings, like the IAB Industry Robot List, and flagged.
- Log entries with known robot strings are filtered from reported ad impressions.
- Google monitors discrepancies between its single-pass approach and the IAB recommended dual-pass approach through a monthly analysis.
- Google obtains the IAB Industry Robot List monthly to identify changes and update its Exclusion List. Google also uses Robot Instruction files (robots.txt) to disallow all robotic activity.
- Internal traffic: Google internal traffic is excluded from Active View reports in all products.
- Behavior analysis: The Google Display Network also uses a sophisticated mechanism for marking queries as spam based on behavior analysis. Queries marked as filtered by this process are purged from Active View reports.
- For the Google Display Network, Google removes any stats that belong to queries marked as spam by Google’s ad spam technology, including but not limited to:
- Queries from known (IAB and more) spam IPs and user agents
- Wrong IPs
- Duplicate queries
- Roboted queries
- Internal and debugging queries
- Queries from spam and policy blacklisted publishers and activity based spam
- For Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360, Google removes any stats that belong to queries from IAB’s published list of blacklisted user agents.
- For the Google Display Network, Google removes any stats that belong to queries marked as spam by Google’s ad spam technology, including but not limited to:
Note: In Google Display Network, Campaign Manager 360, Display & Video 360, if measurements can’t be tied to proper, non-duplicated, non-robotic impressions, they are discarded from Google reports. Campaign Manager 360 now consumes viewable impressions from Active View as a part of their spam process. During data processing, certain log entries are removed. This includes incomplete or corrupted entries, or situations where Google servers assigned an error code status.
Eligibility and requirements for Active View
Supported platforms
| Platform | Eligibility and requirements | |
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| Display | Video | |
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Google Marketing Platform (Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360) |
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| Google Ads |
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| Google Ad Manager |
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| Google Mobile Ads (GMA) SDK |
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| YouTube |
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Web browsers
Active View doesn’t perform Z-order detection of UI elements within web pages and doesn’t have a cross-domain solution for older versions of the web browsers below. All web browsers listed below are supported on all platforms.
- Chrome: Chrome versions 51 and newer support Intersection Observer for cross-domain measurement.
- Edge and Internet Explorer: Edge versions 15 and newer support Intersection Observer for cross-domain measurement. Active View uses a pixel measurement technique on Internet Explorer 11.
- Firefox: Firefox versions 55 and newer support Intersection Observer for cross-domain measurement.
- Note: If the user has disabled image loading, pingbacks are not sent to Google and the ads are considered unmeasurable.
- Safari: Safari versions 12.1 and newer support Intersection Observer for cross-domain measurement.
Considerations around Active View
- Occlusion capabilities: In desktop web, mobile web, and mobile app environments, Active View fully detects occlusions caused by background content and clipped interfaces. Ads playing while a tab is inactive or in picture-in-picture are reported as occluded. Active View detects some occlusions caused by Z-order layering.
- Due to operating system restrictions, Active View doesn’t detect occlusions from overlapping windows. When executing in a cross-domain iframe, it attempts to measure viewability using the Intersection Observer API on modern browsers. It uses a pixel-based technique on Internet Explorer, otherwise reporting the ad as unmeasurable.
- Non-viewable impressions: There are several major reasons for non-viewable impressions:
- Ads don't meet the area coverage criteria:
- 50% of ad pixels in view for regular ads and 30% of ad pixels in view for large size ads
- Ads served below the fold without scrolling to the bottom
- User opens a new tab and quickly tabs away
- Users open multiple tabs, and some are closed before they can view them
- Ads don't meet the time criteria of one second for display and 2 seconds for video.
- Website ads aren’t optimized for mobile devices
- Users may zoom a non-optimized site to view content and the zoom may push ads beyond the boundaries of the viewport
- Ads don't meet the area coverage criteria:
- See-through rates: Measurable rates for display and video traffic in cross-domain frames are high. For example:
- Campaign Manager 360
- Desktop: 99.4%
- Mobile web: 99.4%
- Google Ad Manager
- Desktop: 99.1%
- Mobile web: 97.8%
- Campaign Manager 360
- No proxies: Active View doesn't utilize proxies such as strong user interaction when determining viewable impressions.
- Poll intervals: Parameters for viewability are polled every 100ms for web display ads, 200ms for display ads in the GMA SDK, and 200ms for video ads.
- Cache controls: To minimize the potential of caching, Active View applies HTTP headers, which include
Pragma: no-cache,Cache-Control: no-cache,must-revalidate, andExpires: 0. - JavaScript dependency: Measurement is entirely dependent on JavaScript across desktop, mobile web, and mobile app environments, with the sole exception of YouTube in-app environments. Active View does not use Flash for measurements.
- Live experiments: Active View measures latency through live experiments running continuously to ensure there is no loss of queries or performance metrics.
- Automatic alerts: All stages of the pipeline are monitored with automatic alerts to notify engineering teams of issues.
- Auto-refresh traffic: Currently, Active View reports do not distinguish between human-initiated and auto-refresh generated traffic.
