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Share on XAs digital advertising grows more complex, the industry’s call for transparency has never been louder. Advertisers, platforms, and partners alike are demanding clearer insights into where their ads run, how they perform, and what’s driving results. But for too long, much of that clarity has been locked inside the programmatic black box.
Enter Impression Feed — addressing the industry’s need for transparency.
Known more broadly as log-level data (LLD) or impression-level data, this level of granularity has become a critical component for media buyers and platforms looking to take ownership of their performance. As ad platforms begin to open up access to this data, advertisers and agencies are eager to put it to work — whether to build in-house optimization tools, power custom bidding models, or unify reporting across platforms.
The challenge? Raw data is only as useful as it is accessible and actionable. That’s where IAS steps in.
Understanding Impression Feed
Transparency, customization, and precision are no longer optional — they’re essential for digital media performance. IAS’s Impression Feed meets these demands head-on by giving advertisers and partners direct access to the most granular level of media quality data available.
What is Impression Feed?
Formerly known as Log-Level Data (LLD), Impression Feed is a powerful data solution that provides 250+ metrics at the individual impression level. Each row of data represents a single impression IAS has measured — allowing advertisers to capture detailed insights for every ad served, across supported formats and environments.
Impression Feed delivers highly granular, impression-by-impression quality metrics across fraud, viewability, brand safety and suitability, geo, as well as other advanced metrics and advanced outcome metrics — offering a clear, customizable dataset designed for both verification and performance – collected and normalized across partners.
Impression Feed is designed to meet the needs of today’s most data-driven organizations — from advertisers and agencies to platforms and managed service providers. This high-resolution view enables customers to:
- Build bespoke planning, reporting, and optimization tools
- Join impression data with campaign, audience, or creative signals
- Analyze what’s working — at scale and in detail
Impression Feed puts the raw performance data directly in your hands, giving you the freedom to define success on your terms. With two flexible offerings — Standard and Premium — advertisers can select the level of detail that best suits their business needs and optimization goals.
Who benefits from Impression Feed?
Advertisers use Impression Feed to power in-house optimization tools and gain clearer visibility into where and how their media dollars perform. With high-quality data delivered hourly, teams can benchmark success, monitor campaign health, and reallocate spend with confidence.
Agencies often rely on Impression Feed to streamline media planning and reporting. With access to aggregated, structured data, they can feed proprietary algorithms and provide their advertiser clients with richer, insight-driven recommendations.
Publishers use Impression Feed to unlock powerful opportunities to optimize inventory, improve yield, and strengthen advertiser trust. By leveraging granular impression-level data, publishers can refine page layouts, package high-quality inventory into premium deals, and proactively address campaign performance issues — all with the transparency and credibility of IAS verification.
Platform partners including DSPs and SSPs can use Impression Feed to improve algorithmic buying and inventory curation:
- DSPs tend to leverage the data to feed custom algorithms, like quality CPM (qCPM) optimization to drive greater performance.
- SSPs can use Impression Feed to enhance their services and deliver more curated, high-performance inventory packages.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) integrate IAS data with audience insights to build privacy-safe targeting strategies. By layering keyword signals and contextual intelligence, they deliver more tailored and effective client campaigns.
What data is available in Impression Feed?
Impression Feed includes a comprehensive mix of metrics that span brand safety and suitability, fraud, geo, viewability, and more. Advertisers can choose from a pre-defined set of fields — or work with IAS to build a tailored data schema that aligns with their existing systems and KPIs.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s included in each tier.
Standard Impression Feed: Foundational insights for smarter media strategies
For many teams, media success starts with clarity. The Standard Impression Feed delivers streamlined access to the key metrics needed for day-to-day decision-making and lightweight analytics. This tier is built for advertisers and agencies looking to verify performance, plan future campaigns, and benchmark results using high-quality impression-level data.
The dataset includes 27 core metrics across five categories:
- Metadata: Ad campaign details, media type, and platform type
- Fraud: Detection of invalid traffic types
- Brand Safety and Suitability: Pass/fail results based on IAS standard category settings
- Geo: Country, state, and DMA-level reporting
- Viewability: Yes/No viewable flags, plus video quartile completions
Use cases for Standard Impression Feed include:
- Benchmarking success: Compare campaign performance to peer and industry benchmarks.
- Quick validation: Run rapid checks to confirm setup accuracy and delivery integrity.
- Strategic planning: Conduct post-campaign analysis to inform next-year media decisions.
- Basic performance analytics: Leverage simple metrics like viewability to guide optimizations.
This tier is ideal for advertisers and agencies who need accessible, high-quality data for better control and seamless integration of reporting data into their dashboards/reporting systems.
Go beyond reporting with Premium-level precision
For performance-driven teams, the Premium Impression Feed offers more than transparency — it delivers the infrastructure to build smarter, faster, and more impactful campaigns. With access to enriched impression-level data and customizable metrics, advertisers and partners can go far beyond standard reporting to power in-house models, train AI algorithms, and inform every decision with precision.
Premium includes all Standard fields, plus advanced metrics that enable richer insights, advanced modeling, and deeper optimization:
- Advanced Metadata: Impression ID and browser/device details
- Advanced Fraud: Granular fraud subcategories for detailed risk classification
- Advanced Brand Suitability: Scores across nuanced content categories like hate speech, violence, MFA, and ad clutter
- Advanced Geo: Language signals, time zone, and enhanced location attributes
- Advanced Viewability: Time-in-view, hover rate, scroll depth, and custom visibility calculations
- Derived Outcome Metrics: Proprietary metrics like quality CPM (qCPM) and cost-per-success, designed to align performance with value
- Enriched Data: Additional contextual or platform-derived data from IAS integrations with DSPs and supply partners
Together, these fields support a wide range of applications — from audience modeling and AI training to real-time performance tuning.
Here’s how advanced teams are using Premium to unlock performance:
Joinability and enrichment
Premium Impression Feed integrates seamlessly with both first- and third-party datasets. Using joinable identifiers — such as impression ID, DSP Creative ID, URL, Audience ID, or others — advertisers can uncover a more detailed picture of where, how, and why campaigns perform. This opens the door for richer attribution, deeper audience understanding, and full-funnel campaign insights.
Whether it’s analyzing how a specific creative performs across multiple channels or attributing outcomes to individual publishers, joinability enables a more unified, connected data strategy.
Custom metrics control
One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to media measurement. Premium users have the flexibility to define metrics that match their unique business needs, such as custom viewability definitions, refined brand suitability thresholds, or vertical-specific KPIs.
This flexibility helps internal teams align measurement with campaign goals, reduce noise, and focus on what actually drives success.
High-value signals for smarter decisioning
Premium Impression Feed includes IAS’s most sophisticated quality and outcome-based signals. These advanced metrics are designed to help advertisers move from reactive optimization to predictive planning.
- Attention measurement captures how audiences engage with ads, providing insight into potential impact.
- qCPM reveals the true cost of effective media, factoring in quality and context rather than just price.
- Carbon emissions data enables advertisers to track and reduce the environmental impact of their campaigns while maintaining performance goals.
These signals help advertisers go beyond clicks and impressions to optimize for meaningful outcomes.
Always-on enhancements
As part of IAS’s continued investment in data innovation, Premium Impression Feed users gain early access to cutting-edge metrics as they are developed. From contextual intelligence to attention signals and beyond, Premium users are always equipped with the latest tools to stay ahead of the curve.
Built for custom optimization
One of the most powerful features of Impression Feed — specifically with the Premium tier — is its flexibility. Advertisers can build fully customized, in-house solutions by merging IAS signals with their own campaign, audience, or performance data.
Custom tools can be built using impression-level identifiers such as:
- IAS unique impression ID
- Ad server or DSP macro values (e.g., custom session IDs, DSP creative IDs)
- Device-level signals
Looking ahead, IAS will continue to enrich the dataset through 2025 with planned additions including audience and outcomes signals based on advertiser needs. This ensures that teams using Impression Feed today will be well-positioned for the data demands of tomorrow.
Increasing accessibility to Impression Feed
IAS’s Impression Feed is a critical tool for enhancing transparency, precision, and performance — but accessibility is key to taking action on these metrics. That’s why we’ve partnered with Databricks to join their open-source protocol, which enables secure data sharing across platforms without requiring data duplication or movement.
Through this integration, advertisers have the option to access Impression Feed data directly via Databricks without needing to manually ingest raw log files, reducing operational friction and increasing speed and accessibility to insights.
Explore what’s possible with Impression Feed
Impression Feed is more than a reporting tool. It’s a foundation for transparency, trust, and transformation in digital advertising. In a world where data-driven strategy is the baseline, Impression Feed empowers advertisers to go further — fueling smarter decisions, stronger outcomes, and full visibility into every impression that matters.
Whether you’re starting with the Standard offering or building with Premium, our teams are ready to support your goals with a solution tailored to your data needs.
Contact your IAS representative today to learn more about Impression Feed.
