What is Sell Through Rate?

Sell Through Rate is a sell side metric which is sourced and calculated from either an Ad Network’s Ad server or a individual publisher ad server and represented as a percentage. It represents the number of paid impressions sold divided by the number of ad impressions available for sale.

The Sell Through Rate formula is represented by;

(Paid impressions / Total impressions served) x 100 = Sell Through Rate %

Example:

Your website had 1,000,000 total impressions or “ad calls” for a given period. Only 870,000 of those impressions returned a paid advertisement:

(870,000 / 1,000,000 ) x 100 = 87% Sell Through Rate

The Sell Through Rate is a culmination of all digital sales options which represents “paid impressions”: such as

Price Floor, network errors, internet congestion, sales cycles, timeouts and users leaving a web page before the ad is delivered to the page all contribute to why a perfect 100% sell through rate rarely happens.

« Back to Programmatic Glossary Index