As the advertising ecosystem and related technologies have become increasingly sophisticated, the speed, complexity and technical processes that go into serving, rendering, tracking, and validating an ad has also evolved.  Yet, as the industry has evolved, new terminology has been introduced to reflect the evolution of the technology and by extension, related measurement standards.  This included the "begin to render” requirement introduced in the MRC’s 2017 Impression Measurement Guidelines. These changes have also led to collaborations across the industry to standardize and clearly define subtle differences in the ad rendering and measurement processes. With enhanced sophistication in the technology, we now not only monitor an impression, but additional considerations such as that it was downloaded properly and how, or even if, it was rendered correctly. 

The Adform platform has accounted for and included these dimensions in our capabilities, but updates to naming in industry best practice, including those driven by the MRC, led to some confusion and interoperability of terms when interpreting reported metrics across platforms. In order to enhance clarity and support general industry best practice, we’re making a slight tweak to the terminology used in the Adform platform.  

This means that from October 31st, 2019, across reporting and analytics, we will be re-naming “Impressions” to “Tracked Ads”.  This is purely a cosmetic re-naming where “Tracked Ads” will maintain all of the features, capabilities, and functionality of the metric previously defined as “Impressions”.  For further clarity, Tracked Ads includes both rendered and served-but-not-rendered ads, mirroring the former Impressions metric. 

We believe this change will reduce confusion in the long-term, while enhancing accuracy and providing improved transparency on impression measurement. As a commitment to transparency is at the heart of the services we provide clients, please anticipate additional small enhancements focused on clarity across metrics in the platform in coming months.  

These changes are also being made to align with Adform’s recent continuation of our Media Ratings Council accreditation, an important point of market differentiation which reflects our added focus on transparency, support of industry best practice and rigorous external review (view the full list of accredited companies here).  

Key Things to Note in Brief 

• Please take into consideration that from October 31st, the current “impressions” metric will read as “Tracked Ads”.  This should be kept in mind for consistency or comparison purposes. 
• This change is purely a re-naming, and does not reflect any changes in features, capabilities, performance, billing or reporting behavior.  Tracked Ads includes both rendered and served-but-not-rendered ads, mirroring the former Impressions metric. 
• Importantly, other impression metrics or derived metrics such as rendered-, eligible- or viewable impressions will NOT be changing or impacted. 

To support you during this transition, on hover over the “Tracked Ads” metric in the UI, a tool-tip will highlight the updated naming further clarifying where the change has taken place.  

Please direct any questions or concerns to your local account manager.