A better way to count clicks?

(continued from previous page)

annually, according to estimates. To keep the momentum, executives believe they need to smooth out kinks in the system.

"The way traffic is measured today is a very top-line view of the quality and loyalty of a given audience," said Adam Gerber, a former director of innovation at ad agency MediaVest Worldwide who's now handling advertising for Brightcove, a service that helps companies bring video online. "A media buyer needs a much clearer view of how audiences (find a specific site) because the Web is so dynamic."

Some would argue that agreed-upon metrics are a long time coming.

The online ad industry took more than a few lumps during the dot-com bust because it looked so complex to digital newcomers on Madison Avenue. Web advertising's appeal was not only in the promise that it could deliver a targeted ad to the right buyer at the right time--which didn't pan out then--but also in its measurability. For the first time, advertisers could see data on when a visitor "clicked" or responded to their ad.

A blessing and a curse
But the Internet's measurability turned out to be a blessing and a curse. Publishers had various methods of tracking clicks, ad delivery, visitors and page views (the number of people who look at a page), much to the bafflement of advertisers. Wading through the various data often taxed the patience of ad buyers. And advertisers were often disappointed in the response to their ads.

On the flip side, Web publishers have long been disgruntled over discrepancies in traffic figures from their own records and those of the audience-metric companies, the main supplier of figures to advertisers. Companies like Nielsen/NetRatings rely on relatively small representative panels to estimate total traffic to a Web site. For example, it monitors roughly 24,000 people at home and 4,000 people at work to extrapolate figures. Publishers typically draw data from in-house analytic tools that measure actual traffic to their sites.

Related to that issue are variations in how publishers and metric firms count traffic, as well as how they "roll up" various Web sites into their properties.

"Traffic assignment is a huge issue," said Mark Friendler, CEO of GameDaily, a gaming news and download site.

"A lot of companies are rolling up any sites that will assign them their traffic to have the largest possible number to be on the radar" of an advertiser, he said.

Since the Internet bust, industry leaders have been trying to clean up the messy spots. One project finalized this past year, for example, pushed to create new standards for counting advertisements as they are delivered to a page. In that instance, the Web publishing industry reached consensus on counting ad "impressions" as when the visitor has the opportunity to see the ad on the page, or when the graphic is fully loaded on the page, as opposed to when the graphic is merely sent from an ad server. Some top sites are still changing their pages to meet the standard.

George Ivy, of the Media Ratings Council, an organization that looks at media measurement and accuracy across all media, is working on the standardization project with the IAB. He said that the ultimate goal of the project is to develop common methods for how to count the number of unique visitors to a site. Before that can be accomplished, he said, the task force must devise rules for what counts as a page view--can it be counted twice or only once for content partners?--and how digital tags known as "cookies" play into it.

For example, a certain number of visitors can be identified as "persistent" when they have a browser cookie set and associated with their computer. But many other visitors delete cookies and change computers. "How do you identify traffic from people that don't use cookies?" Ivy said.

Traffic from co-branded Web sites will also be a focus. Publishers that supply content to third parties would have to forgo traffic they used to count on their books. So regardless of whatever short-term pain the project causes, boosters are adamant that it will be a long-term gain for the Web publishing industry.

"It's a great project," said Gerber. "That's because it's going to drive organization and standardization for how content is effectively reported and measured."

[jasonemanuelson1]

Whatever

Lets see how complicated and convoluted we can make stats
tracking. Understanding advertising on the web is already hard
for businesses. It also add needless accounting policies and
procedures and make advertising for small businesses. This is
what happens when you let accountants run a stats engine.

*** ducks for incoming flaming beans ***

[dingleberry420]

agreed

Seems pretty silly to have to rely on others sites to tally your sites unique visitors. Honestly, I didn't even finish reading the whole article. This story made me think "what the ***** are these guys on?!"