Traffic Signals
New guidelines could give a clearer measure of web traffic.
Hits, server logs, impressions, page views--a marketer can
certainly get confused by all the web-traffic measurement lingo. In
2002, the Interactive
Advertising Bureau, an association dedicated to helping various
media companies increase their revenue, introduced its first
measurement guidelines. But what's happened since then?
Quite a bit, says IAB president and CEO Greg Stuart. Stuart
points to the Global Ad Campaign Measurement and Audit Guidelines
developed by the organization's Measurement Task Force,
released last November, as a key milestone in a 5- to 7-year plan
to develop consistent, worldwide web-traffic measurement
mechanisms. "First, we needed to create guidelines for
impressions," says Stuart. "Then, we needed to address
clicks. The third step is to define measurement of uniques. The
industry hasn't really set out to tackle uniques yet."
The guidelines recommend that publishers and advertisers use a
site's server log as the basis for impression or currency
measurement, while incorporating methods to differentiate between
spiders, robots and real people accessing the site. In addition,
sites should prevent browsers from retrieving frequently viewed
pages from their cache. When users view cached pages, those views
aren't recorded by the server and could cause count
discrepancies. The report also recommends that independent auditors
certify counts for U.S. publishers.
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Of course, these guidelines primarily involve players in the big
leagues, says Teri McCready, web marketing consultant and founder
of 360 Web
Marketing in Carlsbad, California. "Smaller companies may
not even know that they can measure anything other than the number
of visitors," McCready says.
She says the guidelines are a step in the right direction and
admits that companies are becoming more stat-savvy. Still, she
says, click fraud and debates over discrepancies between counts
made by servers and the sites themselves need to be resolved. The
guidelines may also be difficult for small web publishers to
understand and incorporate.
"The dividing line is how much they're willing to pay
for consistency, and what they have in terms of IT resources,"
McCready says. "Smaller companies may take a while to catch
up."