Traffic Jams and Tangled Webs – Measuring the Web

Michael Hedges May 7, 2007

The ad girls and the web boys are circling around each other, a generational ritual filled with promises, passion, lies and, of course, money. The web boys – interactive media, to the serious – offer fast connections, big results and promises to please. The ad girls – those with the honey-money – play hard-to-get.

Web producers and Internet publishers pride themselves (mostly) on being the new boys in school. They have, by appearances, a new way of dancing; exotic, enchanting, even erotic. The girls in advertising are, well, interested…notice how they squeal when a new boy enters the room.  But this is an old ritual, genetically engrained.

And, like any 10th grade classroom, the dynamics are intense and complex. Despite pubescent chiming about enduring relationships, the web boys want the honey-money and the ad girls want faster cars and first quarter ecstasy. The newly arrived (Google, YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, et.al) have become big names on campus, kicking sand in the faces of last years’ (or century’s) media. And the ad girls, usually the easy ones, were ready to hook-up.

Paris Hilton on YouTube attracts attention but it’s only a tiny, grainy picture of web and mobile content, double-digit digital viewers and a delightfully expansive medium. The great GREAT majority of ad spending continues to be placed with the better-known and certainly more trusted boys from last years’ class (newspapers, television, radio, direct mail, outdoor). The ad girls know there’s a difference between a one-night stand (which can be fun) and a partnership but, well, sorting it all out with so little information is difficult and stressful, or so they say.

Enter Auntie Measurement.

The ad girls only trust Auntie Measurement. She might not be right all the time but she always wants her girls to be happy. Auntie Measurement doesn’t trust the Internet boys but knows there is certain inevitability. You probably know Auntie Measurement: her name is Nielsen, Arbitron, TNS, GfK, Magid, Ipsos and the like fashioned.

Measuring the Internet audience – borrowing that comfortable but inexact last century term – is the hot topic among advertisers and web and mobile content producers. Advertisers aren’t quite sure how best to relate web traffic to their spending habits. Content producers are also hazy, except they know the key to the honey-money is Auntie Measurement.

Representing web publishers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) busies itself promoting the web to advertisers. It’s a dating service similar, in thought and practice, to those for publishing, television and radio. Advice is offered on consummating the deal.  

Recognizing that Auntie Measurement has the ad girls’ ear, IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg is crying foul. Auntie Measurement, he says, is secretive and not very nice.

“The crux is significant discrepancies between what media companies are able to measure and what the major third-party audience measurement companies are able to measure,” he said in an interview with adweek last week (April 30). “The discrepancies are of such a magnitude that they can't be readily explained. The first step should be to get a process and technology audit of the main audience measurement companies. We haven't been able to get them to set a timetable for auditing.”

Rothenberg asked – demanded, in an open letter to Nielsen/NetRatings and ComScore (Magid) – that all secrets be revealed in a Media Research Council (MRC-US) audit. Both companies, more or less, agreed. Rothenberg and the IAB want a clear path to the honey-money by forcing Aunt Measurement to be more transparent. Not stated, but also clear, is a need to qualify what exactly the measurement company can and cannot do.

Determining site traffic is not all that complicated. Every host and server compiles data by the gigabyte, all in happy machine-readable code. Tallying the count is easy.

Third-party measurement rarely sees – or wants – this data. Web publishers tend not to give away the source data and Auntie Measurement doesn’t trust it anyway. The ad girls are confused about all of this. Although happy to compare apples to dinosaurs advertisers want, with some justification, terms (of endearment) they’ve known; reach, frequency and, more recently, time spent listening, er, surfing.

For performance-based advertising, none of this is really important. In theory, click-though ads are counted, and paid, when a visitor clicks on the ad, signaling either intent to buy or just find out more information. Search engines make their money selling ads by the click. So do big retail sites like Amazon. These sites rely on high volume traffic and a reasonably predictable click-through rate. Google Ads, for one, attempts to improve that click-through rate by inserting ads matched in some way with the web page content.

That click-through is paid to content producers at infinitesimal fractions.

The big money for the Internet media is – or could be – display advertising similar but more dynamic than newspaper, television, outdoor or radio ads. The Internet – and now the mobile phone - adds the possibility of interactivity; oh, yes, the ad girls love the idea of interactivity. Web boys visualize interactivity as enhancing that on-line multi-media experience. Ad girls hear interactivity and think: see ad, buy stuff.

Auntie Measurement, to simplify matters for the ad girls, relies on panels of web users just like the panels of TV viewers. The ad girls understand panels, sub-sets of reality. The web boys see how easily they can be rejected. Oh, how painful! Panels miss the millions of smaller, highly targeted websites.

For all web publishers outside the big five, “…this situation is far from ideal,” said Konrad Feldman, CEO of Quantcast, a specialist measurement service that uses both panels and tags added to website pages. “Advertisers miss out on the opportunity to reach specific audiences that conform well with their products and publishers are unable to generate the return that their audience should justify.  The Quantcast data helps publishers understand the most appropriate advertisers for their audience and our audience search technology allows advertisers to find the right combination of sites to deliver their message.”

Winning the ad girls’ real passion – brand advertising – is the challenge. “With the level of fragmentation that exists on the internet this is a challenging prospect,” says Feldman, “and is the primary reason why, even though there are millions of web destinations, the majority of all online ad spending goes to the 5 largest web companies.”

Inevitably all media measurement discussions are the same. Radio broadcasters are struggling with demands for electronic measurement of exposure, moving away from measuring brand strength. Internet measurement seems to be going in the opposite direction, toward time spent on a site (similar to time spent listening to a radio station) and away from gross reach (hit rate).

As cross media usage patterns are forced into the measurement currency, the ascending medium – the Internet – will, as the boys from last years’ class are learning, shape the way this ritual plays out. Auntie Measurement, however, has seen it all before.

ftm Follow Up & Comments