Exploring the Impact of Problematic Placements

Not all ads behave in ways that work for advertisers. Many do dubious things, like render off-screen or auto refresh frequently, which is bad both for the marketer and the consumer. These behaviors are therefore also unsustainable.

Ads that fall into this category have largely flown under the radar — and continue to be bought by marketers — because the behaviors are characteristics of individual ad placements that appear on a website, rather than attributes of the full page.

Through a custom web crawler, we have been accumulating data about individual ad placements, including GPIDs, lazy load, auto refresh, and other metadata. In April 2024 we conducted an analysis of that data, using a representative set of ~13.8k domains that included roughly 208k unique placements.

Out of the 13.8k domains analyzed, at least 33% had what we call 'problematic placements.' Our analysis explores the nature of those placements, how they compare to other forms of ad waste and why leveraging placement-level data is a must for marketers.