Bank of Montreal boosts viewability with Active View in DoubleClick

Founded in 1817, Bank of Montreal serves over 12 million personal, commercial, wealth management, and investment banking customers around the world. Using Active View in DoubleClick, Bank of Montreal took a hard look at their ads to ensure they were viewable to as many consumers as possible.

The background

While Bank of Montreal's digital display campaigns were bringing in new customers, the bank wasn’t clear on what proportion of the ads they were buying were actually viewable. They wanted to prove their hypothesis that higher viewability meant better results.

Increasing views

Bank of Montreal turned to DoubleClick and the built-in Active View measurement for help. Active View automatically tracks a number of viewability metrics, including how many impressions are viewable (according to MRC standards), what portion of an ad is viewable and for how long. For example, an ad placement at the bottom of a web page might be visible immediately on large screen, but hidden below the fold on a small screen. Both scenarios count as impressions but the ad is not viewable on the small screen unless the viewer scrolls down.

Active View measures viewability with no extra work or tagging needed. It's built to give advertisers confidence that they're reaching users just as they planned and budgeted for. 

Using the Active View metrics, the Bank of Montreal team isolated the placements and sites in their campaign that had viewability rates under 20%. They then divided those underperforming ads into two groups to test possible solutions:

1. For underperforming placements purchased outside of DoubleClick Bid Manager, the team contacted the publishers directly and asked them to reduce the share of less viewable formats. 
2. For the placements purchased with DoubleClick Bid Manager, they chose Active View bid optimization in Bid Manager. The feature uses many signals (e.g. URL, time of day, page category) to predict, impression by impression, the probability that it will be viewable and bids higher or lower based to deliver the viewable CPM target.
   

The Bank of Montreal team found that Active View bid optimization in DoubleClick Bid Manager was an easy and powerful solution to automatically improve viewability, while Active View measurement in DoubleClick Campaign Manager gave them the ability to monitor viewability performance with ease across different publishers. That superior control was key to helping Bank of Montreal ensure publishers were delivering what had been agreed.

Using these DoubleClick solutions, the team quickly discovered that as viewability rose, their CPAs went down. As a result, they were able to place more of their budget with the publishers who delivered the best results.

The Results

When Bank of Montreal paired Active View measurement with the bid optimization, they saw better performance across all their key metrics:

1. 29% lower campaign CPAs
2. A 10X increase in CTRs
3. 44% better viewability

As Bank of Montreal prepares to connect with customers for its next 200 years, Doubleclick is helping them reach more consumers in a more effective way.