Google TV Ads Offers Time-Shifted Viewership Reports

TV viewers are increasingly watching what they want when they want it. About 25% of television households in the United States have digital video recorders or DVRs installed. Today, the Google TV Ads team is excited to announce the launch of time-shifted viewership data, which provides you with insight into how and when viewers see your ads during DVR playback of recorded content. As with all metrics in your Google TV Ads reports, time-shifted impressions reflect the viewership of your specific TV commercial, not just general program viewership. And, what's more, this information is available to Google Adwords TV advertisers for free.

DVR viewership is very fragmented, and thus requires a very large sample to make accurate projections. This is where Google's processing power can benefit you. We process anonymized DVR viewership data from millions of set-top boxes, in order to provide you with accurate, detailed time-shifted impression counts.

Check out this video to learn more about how to access this new data in your reports:



At Google, we love digging into data. So we've been excited to investigate how time-shifted viewing differs from live viewing. Our initial findings suggest that niche programming tends to get a disproportionate percentage of its viewing through DVR. That is to say, without DVR, smaller networks would have a more limited audience. For advertisers, insight into the time-shifted viewership of your ads will help you better understand the full value of the networks and programs you've targeted in your campaign.

We hope access to time-shifted viewership data offers you new insights into how the audience is interacting with your TV commercial.

Posted by Yaroslav Volovich, Software Engineer for Google TV Ads