About viewer modes
Viewer modes can be seen as the context in which a viewer would see your ad, which takes into consideration the various visuals your ad is surrounded with. This boils down to testing your ad in a realistic scenario, where the viewer will have distractions, including thumbnails of relevant videos, the comments section, and even elements in their living room, trying to pull the attention away from your ad. As you might expect, this is impacted by loads of variables. Viewer modes allow you to define in which contextual setting you would like to test your ad.
Why is it important to test for different viewer modes?
If you aren't persuaded by the intro of this article yet, let us break down why testing in context is important.
In short, you simply never know where, how, and when people will see your ad, but there is one thing that's for certain: they will not be in a controlled white box without distractions like Jony Ive in his time at Apple. This means your ad will need to withstand various environments in which it's shown and compete with loads of other pieces of information you cannot control.
To counter this, you can create variations of your ad for each device type, but again to make sure your device-specific ad works, you'll need to test in a contextual setting. This is exactly what we try to accomplish with our viewer modes.
How do viewer modes impact my scores and how are they calculated?
The selected viewer mode impacts two scores;
Since we calculate the amount of attention to the area of the ad versus its surroundings, the viewer mode is key for calculating the ad breakthrough score. Each viewer mode is unique and thus will have a different result.
As the overall score is built up based on the three ad level scores, the viewer mode indirectly impacts your overall score via the ad breakthrough score.
Can the scores impacted by the viewer mode be "duped"?
Well, you can try 🙂
But no, we've built in a mechanism that makes it very difficult to dupe the ad breakthrough score. Instead of running your ad through a single contextual setting for each viewer mode, we actually run it through multiple, also taking into consideration contextual variety:
- light and dark mode
- different resolutions
- different recommendations
- different comments
Once we have generated the data for the variations the data is normalized and then used to calculate the score.
Currently supported viewer modes
Below we take a look at the various viewer modes available in junbi, where the red dotted line resembles the placement of your ad as part of our ad breakthrough score.
Desktop (normal)
The default view for many YouTube viewers on a desktop or laptop. The ad takes about 2/3rd of the screen, while recommendations are shown on the right-hand side.
Theater
A view mode which is less common, and that almost resembles watching in fullscreen, but it does allow users to interact with other elements on the page, including the ability to see comments and search for related content without stopping the video from playing.
Connected TV
YouTube's default view for viewers watching from the comfort of their living room couch. No recommendations are shown and the ad itself is generally displayed in full-screen.
Mobile
The default view for users on a mobile phone, assuming they don't tilt their phone horizontally. Recommendations and/or comments are displayed below the video.
