Nielsen is an audience measurement company that's operated for over 100 years in television and has recently released a product for digital audience measurement called Digital Ad Ratings. Digital Ad Ratings has been an advanced video feature offered in Ad Manager to book reservation campaigns on Nielsen guarantees.
To provide more value to video campaigns and simplify Nielsen's integration in Ad Manager, select publishers can see the following enhancements beginning in August 2021:
- The new "In-target impressions" unit type
- The new "In-demo rate" calculation
- Support for Programmatic Guaranteed and billing changes
- Reporting updates
The new "In-target impressions" unit type
Old behaviorTo make sure Nielsen-measured reservation line items were able to meet delivery goals, Ad Manager previously used line item impression goals as a proxy for needed in-target impressions.
- If you set a goal of 1M impressions, Ad Manager would assume that 1M impressions needed to be served to the selected Nielsen age and gender demographics.
- Every day that a campaign would serve, Nielsen was asked to identify the age bucket and gender of the user who viewed the ads. Nielsen provided Ad Manager with daily aggregates per demographic breakdown per campaign.
- As the line item delivered, Ad Manager automatically updated impression goals based on Nielsen data to make sure that the line item was able to deliver in full.
Example
A Nielsen-measured line item with an impression goal of 1M was consistently pacing toward a 50% in-demo ratio. Based on Nielsen-provided demographic reports, Ad Manager would automatically update the line item's impression goal to 2M.
A proxy impression goal is no longer required for in-target impressions. Instead, a new unit type called "In-target impressions" has been added, to be used with a new cost type called "In-target CPM".
The "In-target impressions" unit type is only available when the GRP provider is set to "Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings". The "In-target CPM" cost type is only available when the unit type is set to "In-target impressions". The line item type must be set to "Standard" for both programmatic and reservations.
Nielsen-enabled proposal line items can only select a unit type of "Impressions" or "In-target impressions".
More considerations
In-target ratio estimates: You can enter an "In-target ratio estimate", which is used in pacing calculations before getting reporting data from Nielsen (approximately 3 days). This value should be greater than 1% and may exceed 100% for line items where co-viewing may be a factor. There is no upper limit to this value, but underdelivery is possible if it's set to high and overdelivery is possible if it's set too low. This may put delivery of other line items at risk.
Example
You set the in-target ratio estimate to be 1% for a line item that has a 1M impression goal. Ad Manager paces the line item as if it had a total impression goal of 100M until a more accurate in-target ratio can be determined from Nielsen's reporting. This happens approximately in the first 3 days of delivery.
Co-view settings: Settings related to co-viewing are still available on in-target impressions goals:
These settings allow you to get credit for impressions served via co-viewing and allows campaigns to be over 100% in-target. For instance, on a campaign with a 1M in-target impressions goal, it's possible that you only need to serve 800K impressions to reach the goal.
The new "In-demo rate" calculation
Old behaviorTo make sure Nielsen-measured reservation line items were able to meet their in-target impression goal, Ad Manager previously assigned an impression goal to each device category to determine the number of impressions needed.
The new in-demo rate is calculated from weighted in-target ratios based on each device category's impression share for the campaign. You can see this new "In-demo rate" in the line item summary.*
* Ad Manager calculates two in-target rates, one from the line item start date (or up to 1 year ago), and another only for the current month. For instance, if today were June 13, this rate would be calculated from data from June 1 to June 13. This rate is only used for billing Programmatic Guaranteed campaigns.
If an in-target ratio doesn't exist for desktop or mobile, but desktop or mobile impressions exist, the CTV in-target ratio is used, with co-viewing factored out.
Support for Programmatic Guaranteed and billing changes
Old behaviorAd Manager previously only offered Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings measurement on reservation video line items.
Nielsen measurement can be used on Programmatic Guaranteed video line items and can automatically bill advertisers only for the in-demo impressions, as set up in the programmatic proposal. When setting up your campaign, the Nielsen target audience and co-viewing settings are negotiable by the buyer.
Advertiser billing
Always set the start date for any proposal before the 20th day of every month. This makes sure that Nielsen has time to send the data needed for each month's billing cycle.
The Ad Manager Programmatic Guaranteed billing workflow bills buyers automatically. Billing is based on the total number of impressions delivered multiplied by the in-target ratio computed for the current month.
Publisher billing
For these deals, publishers are paid net revenue equal to their share of the revenue every month, after the end of the month, where only impressions that are considered in-target (or in-demo) are billed. Net revenue is calculated as:
(Revenue share % × In-target CPM × Impressions × In-demo %) / 1000
Also, the following apply to advanced features:
- Makegood deals: Publishers are charged our revenue share, based on the revenue resulting from in-target impressions only, as a fee for Makegood deals.
- Multiple Customer Management: Revenue share is based on the revenue resulting from in-target impressions only.
- Tiered revenue share: In cases where the revenue share % is tiered, the tier is based on the revenue resulting from in-target impressions only.
- YouTube cross-sell: These deals can't target YouTube cross-sell inventory.
Invoices
As Nielsen charges a fee for use of their digital audience measurement, each month, after the end of the month, publishers are charged a Nielsen fee calculated as:
Nielsen fee rate × Impressions** Both in-demo and out-of-demo impressions
The "Nielsen fee rate" is negotiated between a publisher and Google. For publishers already using Nielsen measurement, this rate already exists. The fee is combined with the fee charged for reservation line items with Nielsen measurement turned on. Also, the following apply to advanced features:
- Multiple Customer Management: The child publisher is charged the Nielsen fee for Manage Account, and the parent publisher for Manage Inventory.
Reporting updates
For the new "In-target CPM" cost type, the Total CPM revenue and Total impressions metrics in "Historical" reports don't factor in the "In-demo rate" for either traditional reservation line items or Programmatic Guaranteed line items set to use Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings as the GRP provider. This also means that Programmatic Guaranteed net revenue reporting doesn't factor in the "In-demo rate".
To estimate revenue with the "In-demo rate" factored in:
- Determine the Total CPM revenue from the "Historical" report for the line item
- Multiply by the lifetime "In-demo rate" for that line item (see the new "In-demo rate" calculation)
As with any revenue in reporting, this is an estimate. The "In-demo rate" used to bill is the monthly rate (and not the lifetime), determined after the end of the month. If the publisher is using a tiered revenue share, the tier used is the first one, since the actual tier isn't determined until the end of the month.
More considerations
- In-demo rates aren't available in reporting from Ad Manager but may soon be available via API reporting
- Reporting metrics for Nielsen-measured line items are similar to those available for Programmatic Guaranteed
