Measurement & verification quiz
Viewability rules, brand safety versus suitability, attribution, incrementality, MMM and attention. Ten questions on how the industry decides whether an ad actually worked. intermediate · 10 questions
Question 1 of 10Score 0
Under the MRC standard, when is a standard display ad counted as viewable?
All questions with answers
- Under the MRC standard, when is a standard display ad counted as viewable?
Answer: When at least 50% of its pixels are on screen for at least 1 continuous second. The MRC display viewability standard is 50% of pixels for one continuous second. It is a low bar that means 'had a chance to be seen', not 'was seen'. - What is the MRC viewability standard for video ads?
Answer: At least 50% of pixels on screen for 2 continuous seconds. Video needs 50% of pixels in view for two continuous seconds. Playing to the end is a separate metric, video completion rate. - What is the difference between brand safety and brand suitability?
Answer: Safety avoids content no brand should appear next to; suitability tailors further to what fits one particular brand. Brand safety is the shared floor, such as illegal or extremely harmful content. Brand suitability is brand-specific: a news story about a crash may be fine for a bank but not for an airline. - Why are broad keyword blocklists controversial?
Answer: They often block safe, valuable content such as hard news, cutting publisher revenue without making brands much safer. Blocking words like 'shooting' or 'virus' catches sports and health journalism too. Suitability tiers and contextual analysis aim to avoid that over-blocking while still achieving brand safety. - What does last-click attribution do?
Answer: Gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the final touchpoint before it. Last-click attribution is simple but rewards whatever came last, often search or retargeting, and ignores what built the demand. Splitting credit is multi-touch attribution; proving causation is incrementality. - Why has multi-touch attribution (MTA) become harder to do well?
Answer: It depends on tracking individual users across touchpoints, which signal loss and privacy rules have made patchy. Multi-touch attribution needs a user-level journey, but App Tracking Transparency, cookie restrictions and consent gaps break the chain. That is part of why MMM and lift tests made a comeback. - Which method best answers 'would these sales have happened anyway without the ads?'
Answer: An incrementality test comparing an exposed group with a holdout group. Incrementality compares people who could see ads with a holdout group who could not; the difference is the lift the ads caused. Attribution models assign credit but cannot by themselves prove causation. - What does marketing mix modeling (MMM) use?
Answer: Aggregate data such as weekly spend by channel and sales, modelled statistically over time. MMM works on aggregates, so it needs no user tracking and covers offline channels like TV. The trade-off is less granularity and slower answers than attribution tools. - If viewability already exists, why do attention metrics exist?
Answer: Being viewable does not mean anyone looked; attention metrics estimate how much human focus an ad actually got. An ad can meet the one-second viewability bar while nobody glances at it. Attention metrics use signals such as time in view, screen share and eye-tracking panels to estimate real attention. - Your ad server counts 1,000,000 impressions; the publisher's counts 1,060,000. What is the most likely explanation?
Answer: A normal discrepancy from different counting points, timing and filtering; investigate if the gap grows beyond roughly 10%. Systems count at different moments and filter differently, so a small discrepancy is expected; many contracts tolerate about 10%. A large or sudden gap deserves a look, but 6% alone is not proof of fraud.