This KPI shows the sum of the Ghost impressions with the Regular impressions.

When measuring Incremental Metrics in App Marketing campaigns and Proximity campaigns in our DSP, we use Ghost Ads.

Ghost impressions are bid requests that we have stored as “ghost impressions” or “placebo impressions” without us serving an actual ad (placing a bid). In other words, with Ghost ads we do NOT serve ads to users that we determine should be placebo users, and we do not serve them any other ad instead.

How does this work

Campaigns running in mediasmart can use our algorithm to select placebo users locked from other campaigns running on mediasmart DSP. Now, when a user is identified as Placebo, instead of serving them a placebo ad, we will serve them a Ghost ad, which means:

Do not place a bid.
Store the bid offer as a “placebo impression” with all the variables associated with the bid offer.
Generate a “placebo click” if it applies, based on the expected CTR calculated for that particular combination of variables in the bid offer.

Advantages

Advertisers can gather more information at no price: no need to actually buy media to gather “placebo” results.
Placebo users will NOT be redirected to the app store, independently of whether the partner used by the advertiser allows for customization of the destination URL or not.

Reporting Ghost impressions

In Campaign Dashboard:
Impressions, Clicks and Conversions will be counted only when they belong to REGULAR users. Data in Campaign Dashboard should closely match data in Daystats.
In Reports:
Impressions, Clicks and Conversions will contain both regular and placebo information if not filtered, but by default, we will add the filter to ONLY REGULAR, which can be removed at any time by the user.
In Daystats:
Impressions, Clicks and Conversions will include ONLY regular events. Placebo events will NOT be counted in these KPIs so that limits and algorithm decisions are not affected by placebo.

Impressions