Technology / Dual Verification

DoubleVerify’s dual-verification system includes creative-side pixel-tracking technology and Virtual Visitor crawlers. This technology ensures compliance by verifying every element of the page where your ad appears – just as if a person had been there.

Virtual Visitors

Virtual Visitors are advanced visual crawlers that render the page, analyze the HTML structure of that page, and take a screenshot of the entire page along with the advertising placement. The technology is designed to take a screenshot of the page and copy the page’s source code. Virtual Visitors are unique to DoubleVerify and enable us to ensure higher see-through rates (STR), which in turn provides more comprehensive, accurate verification.

Virtual Visitors execute all the code on the page (exactly like any humanly-used browser). The crawlers read the HTML and structure of a web page to understand where and what advertisements are running.

Our Virtual Visitors are IAB-compliant, meaning the crawlers identify themselves and don’t count as actual visitors by ad servers. DoubleVerify has dozens of crawling servers located around the globe. We crawl billions of web pages per month as we work to verify more than 35 billion impressions monthly. Our crawlers mimic a real world visitor by accessing sites from different locations and imitating different user behaviors.

Tracking Pixel

The DoubleVerify Tracking Pixel, is embedded within the client’s ad at the ad server level and is served along with the ad’s creative. Once the ad is served, the Tracking Pixel searches through nested iFrames to identify and extract the URL for the page where the ad is served and identify the user’s location. This information is used to compare the site and physical location where the ad was served to the campaign’s monitoring settings so that DoubleVerify can determine whether the impression is compliant.

The Tracking Pixel does not place a cookie, beacon or other data-retrieval mechanism on the browser or collect any personally-identifiable information. The Tracking Pixel collects only the following data when a DoubleVerify-monitored ad is served: identifying information for the campaign to which the ad belongs, the URL of the domain where the ad was served, the time stamp for the time the ad was served and the user’s IP address and browser type (user agent).

See-Through Rates

See-Through Rates are the percentage of ad impressions that can be accurately located and verified. Most standard verification solutions have STRs between 30% – 60%. Due to the opacity of nested iFrames, if an advertiser’s solutions rely on blocking technology alone and providers have faulty STRs, they are potentially losing out on valuable inventory and potentially blocking up to 70% of impressions.

DoubleVerify’s STR is higher than 95%. DoubleVerify is the only ad verification company that can “see-through” three or more nested iFrames to determine where the ad is being served.

Double verification is the only way to guarantee that every impression counts.