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for web advertising
IAB defines page impressions, clicks, visits, etc.
By Marty Beard
Faith in the effectiveness of internet advertising has been slow to develop, and at least part of the reason has been a lack of uniform measurement and accountability standards.
The uncertainty endures despite the promise the internet holds as an ad medium. At least in theory, the internet gives publishers and advertisers the capacity to track and control precisely when, by whom and how many times an advertising message is seen.
The problem is that there’s no universal approach for tallying each instance that an ad is viewed. And that leads in turn to disputes over billing. Understandably, advertisers aren’t keen on paying for ads that are “seen” by automated web-indexing tools such as spiders and bots, for example.
To resolve the issue, a consortium led by the Interactive Advertising Bureau has released a set of voluntary principles for measuring online ads.
“It gives us an apples-to-apples comparison, which we didn’t have before,” says IAB CEO Greg Stuart.
“Even different publishers use different methodology. So when you don’t know if XYZ site is measured the same way as ABC site, then that’s a complication. The issue is that we want consistency, and we want disclosure.”
The guidelines set forth by the IAB define the internet’s sometimes-confusing ad metrics, such as ad impressions, page impressions, clicks, unique visitors and total visits. The report delineates ways to account for them.
For example, the IAB report notes that there are two methods of counting ad impressions: server-initiated, in which web sites’ servers count, as well as direct ad content; and client-initiated, in which consumers’ browsers count, as well as direct ad content.
If the counting method is client-initiated, the impression should be counted “at the publisher’s ad server or third-party ad server, subsequent to the ad request,” the report says.
Additionally, popular ad formats such as the pop-under, which open new browser windows independently of consumers’ actions, are sometimes counted as representing separate visits to a web site, even though users are not voluntarily going to the sites of the advertisers that deploy such ads.
The IAB standard for counting page impressions should help clarify the matter. Pop-ups, interstitials and pop-unders, the report says, should be counted as ad impressions. Surveys, HTML newsletters, auto-refreshed pages and frames should be counted as page impressions.
The IAB also recommends that publishers filter out traffic from so-called spiders and bots, not counting them as visits.
Spiders and bots can substantially inflate a web site’s traffic numbers but are of no value to advertisers, who only want to pay for actual visitors and the ad impressions they create.
The second phase of the guidelines and online ad campaign measurement project will be completed later this year. It will quantify the differences in counts that arise from using different metrics.
The IAB hopes the new guidelines will end at least some of the confusion over web measurements.
“‘Once and for all’ would be too-strong language, quite honestly,” Stuart says.
“I would say that our position on this is that in terms of discrepancies themselves, the standards will eliminate 50 to 70 percent of them. So some discrepancy will still exist in the marketplace.”
The IAB’s new standards are backed by the Advertising Research Foundation, ABC Interactive, the Media Rating Council, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Association of National Advertisers. The study itself was carried out over a six-month period by accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
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Interactive
Advertising Bureau |
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| Metric | Definition |
| Ad impression | A measurement of responses from an ad delivery system to an ad request from the user’s browser, which is filtered from robotic activity and recorded at a point as late as possible in the process of delivery of the creative material to the user’s browser – therefore closest to being an actual opportunity for the user to see an ad. |
| Visit | One or more text and/or graphics downloads from a site qualifying as at least one page, without 30 consecutive minutes of inactivity, which can be reasonably attributed to a single browser for a single session. |
| “Unique” measurements | Applies to browsers, visitors and users. The number of actual individual people, within a designated reporting time frame, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site or the delivery of pushed content. A unique user can include both 1) an actual individual that accessed a site (referred to as a “unique visitor” or 2) an actual individual that is pushed content and/or ads such as email, newsletters, interstitials and pop-under ads. Each individual is counted only once in the unique user or visitor measures for the reporting period. |
| Page impression | A measurement of responses from a web server to a page request from the user browser, which is filtered to remove robotic activity and error codes prior to reporting and is recorded at a point as close as possible to the user's opportunity to see the page. Much of this activity is recorded at the content server level. |
| Click | User reactions to internet content or advertising. Three types: Click-through, in-unit click and mouse-over. Click-throughs are measurements of user-initiated actions of clicking on an ad element, causing a redirect to another web location. In-unit clicks and mouse-overs do result in server log events and new content being served but may not necessarily include a redirect to another web site. |
| Source: Interactive Advertising Bureau |
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January 17, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.
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