Unlike traditional computing devices, internet browsing on mobile devices are different – you only zoom and view sections of a webpage that you want to see. While that works fine for most part, advertisers who pay ad networks on an impression basis may lose out considering that the mobile phone user may have skipped the advertisement section altogether.
So how should it work? A Google patent application made public last week tells us how. In the application, the engineers explain the process of using “display thresholds” as a metric to ascertain if an advertiser should be charged for an impression or not. The application reads,
“An impression is determined to have occurred if a display of an advertisement in the viewport exceeds certain display thresholds so that the advertisement is likely to be discernible to a user of the device. These display thresholds can include, for example, the percentage of the advertisement displayed in the viewport of the device and the zoom level of the viewport (or scale of the viewport). The display thresholds can also include the duration with which the advertisement is displayed in the viewport.”
It is not clear if Google already makes use of this metric on their advertisements. Nevertheless, this is an interesting exercise that should make mobile-advertising all the more attractive to advertisers.