It's understandable to be surprised when your Video Completion Rate (VCR) goes above 100%, as it seems counterintuitive. This phenomenon is a known industry-wide issue, particularly with Connected TV (CTV) advertising, and isn't unique to AdRoll.
Here's the breakdown of why it can happen:
- Strict Impression Validation: Our system, like most in the CTV ad industry, heavily scrutinizes ad impressions for validity. We are very strict about ensuring that the impressions we bill you for are genuine and not duplicates or incomplete.
- Filtering Out Invalid Impressions: If an impression appears to be a duplicate or lacks crucial information, it gets "thrown out" and isn't counted towards your total impressions. This usually affects a very small percentage of impressions (typically 1% or less).
- Completion Data vs. Impression Data: The percentage metrics for video completion (like 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% completion) are often tracked slightly differently than the initial "impression" count. These completion milestones are usually not subject to the same strict filtering for duplicates or invalid data that the initial impression count undergoes.
- The Math Behind It: When a small number of initial impressions are removed due to being deemed invalid, but the corresponding completion events (e.g., 100% views) for those ads are not removed, the calculation can lead to a Video Completion Rate over 100%.
Example
- Imagine 100,000 CTV ads started playing (initial impressions).
- 99,997 of those ads played all the way to 100% completion.
- However, our system later identifies and removes 10 impressions from the original 100,000 because they were deemed invalid (e.g., duplicates).
- So, your valid impression count becomes 99,990, but you still have 99,997 completions.
- The calculation is then (99,997 completions / 99,990 valid impressions) * 100 = 100.007% VCR.
This means that while a small number of impressions were filtered out for quality assurance, the video did complete for the corresponding views. It's a rare occurrence but a known behavior in CTV advertising across the industry.