Adver­tis­ing sales man­agers and busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers alike have a shared inter­est in enhanc­ing their agency’s online adver­tis­ing sales and, thanks to OnScroll, a new start­up from across the pond, they now have a ground­break­ing new toy to play with to achieve that aim.

The grandad­dy of online ads, as every busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er can tell you, is the trusty ban­ner ad. But how they’re served to inter­net users hasn’t real­ly evolved that much, unlike their new­er rela­tions, text ads and tar­get­ed ads. That’s where Lon­don-based OnScroll steps in: there’s a big dif­fer­ence, its co-founder Babac Vafaey insists, between “served ads” and “view­able ads.” And adver­tis­ers need to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between them if they’re to avoid wast­ing a lot of money.

A served ad isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a viewed ad

Most inter­net users are famil­iar with the way ban­ner ads are served. They might be brows­ing The Wall Street Jour­nal web­site and will doubt­less notice promi­nent­ly placed ban­ner ads near the top of the side bar. As they scroll down the arti­cle, they’ll come across addi­tion­al ads. But if they didn’t get very far, it’s high­ly doubt­ful whether they will have even got to the ads at the bot­tom of the page, even though they count as “served.”

The num­ber of ads that are served but not actu­al­ly seen by human eye­balls is stag­ger­ing, accord­ing to OnScroll. Its research sug­gests that the fig­ure is 54 per cent, which trans­lates into a shock­ing $11.7 bil­lion in wast­ed ad spend every year. OnScroll aims to put a stop to that. Vafaey explains:

“Basi­cal­ly, we’re ana­lyz­ing users’ behav­ior on a giv­en page to the extent that we can deter­mine the high­est per­cent­age chance of where and how an ad will be viewed. Then we can actu­al­ly mea­sure how long an ad is being seen and give peo­ple a whole lot more infor­ma­tion than they had before.” 

A must-have new toy for busi­ness devel­op­ment managers

This is the kind of thing to set the sap ris­ing in the for­ward-think­ing busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er. OnScroll, which is in beta at present, is a tool for agen­cies and pub­lish­ers that lets them access the real ana­lyt­ics of user behav­ior, and then use that data to place their ads intel­li­gent­ly and deliv­er accu­rate feed­back to adver­tis­ers. That’s a new toy worth its weight in gold.