Signal Benchmarks FAQ

About the tool and getting started

What are Signal Benchmarks?

Signal Benchmarks is a new dashboard within the Sovrn Platform to help publishers compare their performance against their peers across a range of variables including by country, category, or size.

What does this enable me to do?

As a publisher, Signal Benchmarks will enable you to compare your ad performance to cohorts of other publishers and help you better understand the value that buyers place on your ad inventory. 

What are the key benefits? 

• Benchmark your viewability scores, CPMs, engaged time & click rate against cohorts of other publishers. 

• Define these cohorts based on ad size, country, site category & site size.

• Better understand how buyers are evaluating your ad inventory.  

• Available through one, easy Signal integration.

How does this differ from other tools? 

The data powering the Signal Benchmarks product is taken from the 40,000+ global sites working with Sovrn, and updated daily, to allow publishers to benchmark their ad performance against both a wider and more granular view of the market. 

How do I get access to Signal Benchmarks? 

• For existing Signal customers, you can find Benchmarks within the Signal section of your Sovrn Platform account here. To compare your CPMs, you will need to provide Sovrn with read-only API access to your Google Ad Manager (GAM) account (if not set up already).

• For customers new to Signal, a free version of Signal Benchmarks is available when you implement the Signal tag on your page. Reach out to your Sovrn representative or support@sovrn.com to get started. 

Using the tool

What are the metrics available for me to benchmark against?

There are currently four metrics available to benchmark against. In the dashboard, you can see your scores for the metrics below, compared to a cohort of publishers:

1. Viewability: % of viewable impressions, according to IAB standards. 

2. CPM: (Cost Per Mille) of your programmatic impressions from Google Ad Manager (GAM). 

3. Engaged time: average time in seconds that impressions were engaged with.

4. Click rate: % of impressions that a user has clicked on. 

How does Signal calculate engaged time?

To measure whether the user is engaged with the page, Signal tracks 45 different events around mouse movement, touch, scrolling, etc. that show the user is interacting with the page. Signal then counts the amount of time in seconds these user events are taking place to determine engaged time. Find out more in the blog post. 

How does Signal calculate click rate? 

To measure whether a user has clicked on an ad, Signal tracks whether a user has clicked within the iframe of that ad impression, and then if that page is no longer in focus. 

What filters are available to benchmark my ad performance on a more granular level?

• Filter your ad performance data by the individual domain(s). 

• Filter both your and the benchmark data by time frame & common ad sizes.

• Filter the benchmark data by:

  • Country: Data grouped by traffic source. The top 5 countries where your site(s) receive the most traffic are listed, updated monthly.   

  • Site Category: Sites grouped by IAB?s content taxonomy. 

  • Site Size: Sites grouped by total page views per month. 

Are there any more benchmark metrics and/or filters coming soon?

We are currently taking feedback on what other metrics and filters would be valuable for publishers to be able to benchmark against. If you have any requests or feedback, please fill out this survey. 

Where is my ad performance data coming from? 

Your CPM data is being queried from your GAM account daily, for programmatic demand channels and domains where Signal is live. All other data is collected directly from your pages and display advertising by Signal. 

Where is the benchmark data coming from? 

The benchmark data is made up of the 40,000+ global sites working with Sovrn. To be able to compare against other publishers, all CPM data is converted to USD, using a daily updated exchange rate.

Why am I unable to see CPM data in the dashboard?

To see your CPM data so that you can compare this to other publishers in the Benchmarks dashboard, you will need to provide Sovrn with API access to your Google Ad Manager account. Please follow the instructions: Enabling Google Ad Manager (GAM) API Access for Signal. 

Some of my domains are not listed in the dashboard, why is that?

Domains, where Signal is seeing a very small amount of traffic, are filtered from the Signal dashboards.  

Why am I seeing no benchmark data after applying some filters? 

When the benchmark data is 0 after applying some filters, this means that Signal does not have any data on that specific cohort of publishers. You should see a notification in the bottom right corner of the screen informing you that this is the case. 

What does “You've chosen filters that have returned low volumes of data” mean? 

When you see this notification after applying some filters, this means that Signal does not have sufficient breadth and volume of data on publishers in this specific cohort to be fully confident that this is a good representation of the market.

How often does data get updated?

Data is updated daily by 9 am UTC for the previous day. 

If you have any further questions, don?t hesitate to contact your Sovrn Support.