The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) today unveiled new guidelines to sharpen the accuracy of audience measurement in hopes of propping up the struggling online ad market.
Based on a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the new rules zero in on ad impressions, clicks, unique visitors, total visits and page impressions. Eleven major portals, destination sites, ad networks and third-party ad servers provided input for the report.
Advertisers pay according to the number of times an ad is clicked, but how the counts are tallied varies. Advertisers complain that some measurements show a higher total count than the actual number of users who viewed an ad.
Among the targets of IAB's new rules are "spiders" and "bots," software that enables Web sites and search engines to cruise the Web and categorize what they find. Some publishers include such finds - or "hits" - in tallying the number of times a site is visited.
The IAB, in its voluntary guidelines, urges the use of filtration techniques to winnow out these hits. "Filtration of site or ad-serving transactions to remove non-human activity is highly critical to accurate, consistent counting," the IAB said in its report.
The report also recommends improved counting of ad impressions, which are measured by responses via server-initiated or client-initiated delivery systems. A server-initiated system use the site's Web content server to count ads and client servers utilize the user's browser.
"For organizations that use a server-initiated ad counting method, counting should occur subsequent to the ad response at either the site's ad server or the Web content server or later in the process," the report said.
Using the client method, counting should occur at the publisher's ad server or third-party ad server after the request, the IAB said.
"Servers aren't buying things from advertisers - people are," said Jeff Minsky, vice president of Media Convergence, an interactive media planning firm. "We don't want to be paying for waste across the board."
Minsky said the IAB recognizes the importance of when an ad is close to delivery, not when an ad has been requested.
Much is at stake, according to the IAB's own figures: Online ad revenue in the first 9 months of 2001 was down 8.4 percent from the same period in 2000.
But it will get better, according to Gartner analysts, who predicted last month that U.S. Internet advertising will grow from $7.9 billion this year to $18.8 billion by 2005. Year-over-year growth through the period, however, will be just 15 percent, compared with 100 percent in 1998, Gartner said.
The IAB report should serve as a wake-up call to clients, publishers, agencies, research organizations and ad-serving companies about the importance of standardized measurement practices, said Adam Gerber of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
"We can't stress enough, however, that today's announcement means nothing if there is not quick adoption, and continued refinement to address evolving technology and advertising solutions," he said.
The full IAB report and PricewaterhouseCoopers study can be seen at http://www.iab.net
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com
17:02 CST
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