Visibility and Security of Advertising in Russia in 2023

  • Ad visibility has slightly increased compared to previous years.
  • The level of fraud has increased significantly.
  • Brand safety remains high despite the rise in complex fraud categories.

An extremely useful and necessary report was prepared by Weborama. It is valuable for its average metrics across the Russian market from a reliable verifier. The research was based on 129 billion ad impressions. Overall, the volume of ad impressions with enhanced verification has doubled over the past two years .

Clicks

The average figures from the report on CTR will tell you if your user engagement is up to par. If the figures are lower, it's worth thinking about; if they're higher, good job.

On average, CTR for banner advertising was 0.11%, with fullscreen once again being the most clickable format — the king among banners. Overall, mobile banners gather much more clicks (0.5%) and attract more attention than their desktop counterparts (0.15%).

Outstream video shows an average CTR of 0.6%. The rate is again higher on mobile (0.9%) than on computers (0.63%).

Instream video has the highest rates: an average of 1%, mobile 1.7%, desktop 1.02%.

Ad Visibility

According to Weborama data, in 2023 ad visibility (according to the MRC standard) stabilized compared to previous years (the decline is associated with the departure of Google and other Western platforms). The average visibility rates were: for outstream video formats: 77.66%, for instream video formats: 73.81%, and for banner formats: 52.52%.

Brand Safety

The brand safety indicator is the measures and technologies companies use to prevent their ads from appearing next to undesirable or harmful content. This is important for maintaining the reputation of the brand and consumer confidence in its reliability. Brand safety helps avoid associations with extremist materials, fake news, or inappropriate content, which can negatively affect the brand's perception by clients and partners.

This indicator remained high, with 94-95% of analyzed campaigns placed in safe content. Weborama conducted the analysis based on data collected using Weborama Campaign Manager and Adloox tools.

On computers, brand safety for display advertising was 94.71%, and for video — 90.9%. On mobile devices, these figures were 96.76% for display and 89.34% for video.

There were the most restrictions due to keywords and illegal publisher content.

Completion Rate

The completion rate is the figure that tells how many users watched the ad to the end.

Outstream leads with a rate of 75%, with Instream slightly lower at 71.6%.

Fraud

IVT (Invalid Traffic) is a general term for any traffic that does not correspond to a real, interested user. IVT is divided into two categories: GIVT and SIVT.

GIVT (General Invalid Traffic) is a form of fraud that is easily detected and filtered using basic algorithms. Examples of GIVT include bots, clickers, and so forth.

SIVT (Sophisticated Invalid Traffic) is a more complex type of fraud that requires more advanced methods for detection and filtering. SIVT includes more sophisticated forms of fraud, such as hidden ads, imitation of real users, and others. Example: a website that hides ads in opaque iframes, so the ad loads but is not visible to the user.

Recently, MRC updated its guide for dealing with low-quality traffic

The level of IVT has increased 4.5 times compared to the previous year. GIVT increased by 11.8%, reaching 3.13%. The most active subcategory of simple fraud was bots, which doubled in number. Honorable second place goes to MFA. SIVT increased 4.5 times and reached 0.91%. Here, the most active category is malicious software.

The increasing spread of complex types of fraud, such as Bad Autorefresh (increased 3.5 times), Bad External Traffic, and Ghost ad recall, is particularly emphasized.

Bad Autorefresh is a method used by some websites to automatically refresh ad pages to artificially increase the number of ad impressions. This creates a false impression of the page's popularity and deceives advertisers, causing them to pay for unseen ad impressions.

Bad External Traffic is traffic that comes to a site from external sources, generated using bots or other automated systems to mimic real visitors.

Ghost ad recall is a behavior pattern where users massively leave the page between zero and three seconds after the page loads. This behavior indicates low-quality traffic or bots that do not interact with the page content and leave it immediately.

For Publishers

Monitor the quality of your content and traffic. Fraud is growing rapidly, and as part of the sales chain, you need to contribute to combating it.

Forecast

The level of invalid traffic will continue to rise. There will be more products to combat fraud.

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