The transparency of ad placements has always been a struggle between advertisers and blind ad networks. Not knowing where your advertising dollars are going can cost you valuable impressions and clicks towards a campaign. As advertisers have less certainty to where their ad budgets are being allocated, service providers that offer ad-verification placements are becoming more popular.

Why won’t it become standard for ad networks to show clients the site list where they are placing the media? It seems that if a client needs to hire a 3rd party ad-verifier because they do not trust the network they work with, then they shouldn’t be working with them in the first place.

These ad-verification providers, like DoubleVerify, AdSafe and AdXpose, are able to track client’s ads using tracking pixels embedded in the ad tags. They are then able to monitor where the ads are being placed and remove them from sites that are inappropriate to the client—not to mention a refund from the publisher’s network. These ad-verifiers do more than just ensure that your ad doesn’t appear on adult content sites, but also review any specified IO agreements like page placements and geo-targeted placements.

“The use of verification is growing exponentially,” said Kent Wakeford, chief revenue officer of AdSafe. “It’ll become standard in online media buying.”

Although this new ad-verification service is able to catch and report the problem of misplaced ads, it doesn’t necessarily solve it. Even if the ad is taken down from an inappropriate site, the inventory bought is still lost from the media buy. The client is now getting a reduced number of impressions and has nowhere to place the excess media.

Fees for such services are about 5 cents per thousand impressions and although that seems low, it is an unnecessary expense to a client for trying to place media fairly. Fully transparent networks are the only way to give clients the confidence of using an agency without having to hire ad-verifiers.

Here at Broad Street Interactive, our ad placements are fully transparent on our hyper-local CPM ad buys. There is no “blind ad network” so you don’t have to worry about not knowing exactly where you are spending your money. When you pay for a media buy with Broad Street Interactive you get a full site list and approval of each media plan before we place any ad.