What Is Cost Per Verified Delivery (CPVD)?

How CPVD works

CPVD is a unit-economic model, not a bidding model. The business chooses where its message runs: a tunnel (a 1-mile stretch of road), a zone (a neighborhood hexagon), or background rotation, funded by a monthly deposit. When the WilDi Maps app delivers the message to a member's phone in that road or area, the delivery is logged with the phone's GPS fix. It counts as one verified delivery, and is billed, only if the member taps the WilDi button and the acknowledgment passes the billing rules (from $0.25 on background rotation; tunnels and zones priced higher for hyper-local).

There is no auction, no DSP, no SSP, and no real-time bidding intermediary. The location signal is generated on the member's own device by an app the member installed, and the delivery event is recorded by infrastructure WilDi Maps controls end-to-end.

The unit price is the unit price, and it is set by the account's monthly deposit tier rather than by an auction: Enterprise $0.25 per verified background delivery at $3,000 a month and up, Pro $0.32 at $1,000 and up, Local $0.40 at $250 and up, Starter $0.50 below that. At the Local tier a thousand background deliveries cost $400; at Enterprise the same thousand cost $250. Tunnels and zones are priced above the background rate. What the rate does not do is move with auction pressure, seasonality, or competing advertiser demand.

CPVD vs CPM, CPC, CPA

Each established model bills the advertiser for a different unit. The unit you pay for determines what you actually get, and what an exchange or platform can shave off the top before you get it.

Why CPVD matters in 2026

Two forces have pushed the auction-based digital ad stack past the point where CPM, CPC, and CPA mean what advertisers think they mean. Neither of them is bots, and anyone who leads with bots is telling you the wrong story.

The first is what the supply chain keeps. The Association of National Advertisers publishes a quarterly benchmark built from impression-level logs matched against sell-side logs by TAG TrustNet and Fiducia. In its Q3 2025 findings, on web and mobile excluding connected TV, transaction costs took 26.9% of the ad dollar (SSP platform fees 13.2%, DSP data 3.6%, DSP platform and other the balance) and media-productivity loss took a further 26.1%, leaving TrueAdSpend, the working media, at 47.1%. These are medians across 21 actively contributing marketers and $142 million of spend, and they exclude agency, ad-serving and brand-safety fees, so the waterfall is not all-in.

The second is that the loss is structural, not fraudulent. The same Q3 2025 productivity-loss bucket is 15.2% non-measurable impressions and 10.1% non-viewable, against 0.5% made-for-advertising sites and 0.3% invalid traffic. The money does not mostly go to bots. It goes to impressions nobody can measure or nobody could see. For the structure of where each layer sits, the ANA's December 2023 study is still the only fully itemized waterfall it has published: on $1,000 of open-web spend, $130 SSP platform, $80 DSP platform, $60 DSP data, $20 DSP additional, then $150 non-measurable, $100 made-for-advertising, $95 non-viewable and $5 invalid traffic, leaving $360. That 36-cent figure is 2023 structure, not today's level, and we never quote it as current.

Two other measured facts are worth having in view. DoubleVerify's 2025 report puts fraud and sophisticated invalid traffic at 1.0% in North America (0.8% in the US) and the authentic viewable rate at 71%. The same report finds 41% of North American consumers use ad blockers, which is the best current evidence that interruptive advertising is being actively refused rather than merely missed.

CPVD is a structural answer to the fee and measurability problem: a closed-loop pricing unit where the delivery is verified at the device, the location is generated by the device, and the only party between the advertiser and the member receiving it is WilDi.

Working media on web and mobile

47.1%

TrueAdSpend, Q3 2025, web and mobile excluding connected TV; transaction costs 26.9%, productivity loss 26.1%. Last quarter the ANA itemized that cut; current all-environments headline 45.1% (Q2 2026)

ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, Q3 2025, with TAG TrustNet and Fiducia

Transaction costs, share of the ad dollar

26.9%

Q3 2025, web and mobile excluding CTV; primarily SSP and DSP fees, before any quality loss

ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, Q3 2025, with TAG TrustNet and Fiducia

Measured fraud and invalid traffic

1.0%

North America, 2025 (0.8% US). The ANA measured invalid traffic at 0.3% of spend in Q3 2025

DoubleVerify 2025 Global Insights Report, North America

North American consumers using ad blockers

41%

2025; the clearest measure of active refusal of interruptive advertising

DoubleVerify 2025 Global Insights Report, North America

Real-world example: $1,000 of CPVD vs $1,000 of programmatic

An HVAC contractor in Jacksonville puts $1,000 a month against a service area. Two pricing models, two very different unit deliveries.

$1,000 on programmatic display: Of that dollar, 47.1 cents became a benchmark-qualified impression in the ANA's Q3 2025 benchmark on web and mobile excluding connected TV, the last quarter the ANA itemized that cut; its current all-environments headline is 45.1% (Q2 2026). That is a median across large national advertisers. The ANA's Q4 2025 findings then split participants at the median of TrueAdSpend: the higher-performing half converted 56.7% of spend into benchmark-qualified impressions and the lower-performing half 37.5%. That is a median split on the outcome, not a split between advertisers who do and do not run a transparency program. Our own read, not the ANA's, is that every mechanism behind the better half (private-marketplace curation, supply-path optimization, log-level feeds, staff whose job is supply-chain governance) is something a contractor spending $1,000 a month cannot buy, so a local advertiser should plan against the lower half.

$1,000 on CPVD: a $1,000 monthly deposit is the Pro tier, so the background rate is $0.32. $1,000 divided by $0.32 is 3,125 verified deliveries: qualifying acknowledgments from opted-in members in the area you chose. (At $3,000 a month the tier rate drops to $0.25 and the same arithmetic gives 12,000; at $250 a month it is the Local tier at $0.40 and 625 deliveries. Tunnels and zones cost more than background.) Every delivery is location-checked with the phone's GPS. There is no exchange rake to subtract and no unmeasurable inventory.

Those two numbers are not the same unit and we are not going to pretend they are: a delivery is not an impression and not a lead. The comparison that is fair is what you can prove happened to the dollar. The Middleman Tax page breaks down exactly where the programmatic dollar leaks.

Industries best suited to CPVD

CPVD is most efficient when three conditions hold: the buyer is a homeowner or someone driving, the service area is geographically defined, and the cost per acquired customer in the incumbent channel is high enough that paid clicks no longer pencil.

• HVAC. LocalIQ's home-services benchmark covering April 2024 to March 2025 puts the median HVAC search lead at $127.74 at a $9.68 median cost per click, against $90.92 and $7.85 for home services overall.
• Roofing. Storm-driven service area, high ticket value (HomeAdvisor's cost guides put a roof replacement at a $9,607 national average), and the most expensive lead in the LocalIQ table at a $228.15 median.
• Plumbing. Emergency-driven and geographically tight, with a $129.02 median search lead at a $10.49 median cost per click in the same LocalIQ edition.
• Electrical / solar. Same shape as HVAC: homeowner buyer, defined service radius, high-ticket conversion.
• Auto repair, towing, mobile detail, mobile mechanics. The customer is literally someone driving, and a tunnel on the right road maps directly onto the buying universe.
• Local restaurants and QSR on a commute route. Fixed delivery cost beats CPM-priced highway-adjacent display when the goal is route capture.

How verification works

Verification is the load-bearing word in CPVD. Without it, the model collapses into another inference layer. Three architectural choices keep it deterministic.

The definition we hold ourselves to: a WilDi verified delivery is not an estimated impression. It is a qualifying acknowledgment, an auditable app event in which an opted-in member receives the business's message at the required location, acknowledges it by tapping the WilDi button, and the acknowledgment passes WilDi's billing rules. Opening the business's website, calling it, or getting directions are separate actions; none of them is the acknowledgment. Most advertising currencies charge for modeled exposure, qualified impressions, or inferred attention; this one charges for an explicit, location-checked human acknowledgment. What the acknowledgment proves is that an intentional human interaction occurred. It does not prove cognitive attention, and we do not claim it does. Other channels do measure, and some measure well: out-of-home has been standardized since the MRC finalized its Out-of-Home Measurement Standards on December 4, 2025, Geopath models likelihood to notice from eye-tracking research, Place Exchange PerView establishes device presence deterministically and Quividi reads head direction on camera-equipped screens. The difference is the unit, not whether the other side is measured at all.

1. Device-side GPS fix. The member's own phone, running the WilDi Maps app, generates the location signal locally. There is no third-party SDK reselling location into a bid stream. Consumer GPS is good to single-digit metres in the open and degrades in dense urban blocks, which is why a tunnel is drawn as a street-aligned polygon rather than a thin line.
2. First-party event log. The delivery event (message shown, timestamp, device GPS, road or area ID) is written by infrastructure WilDi controls end-to-end. No exchange, no SSP, no impression-laundering layer between the device and the billing system.
3. Real person, not a bot. The member is a known account on a known device with an earnings record, who installed the app to receive messages from local businesses and earn a share of the advertising spend. Measured invalid traffic in programmatic is small (1.0% per DoubleVerify, 0.3% per the ANA), so this is not the main argument for the model; it is simply a surface that does not exist here.
4. Location check. A delivery only counts if the phone's GPS position falls inside the road or area the advertiser chose at the moment of delivery. The check is geometric, not statistical; GPS itself still carries the error described above.