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NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> What does an advertiser *need* to know?
ONLINE-ADS>> What does an advertiser *need* to know?
Bob Wyman (bobwyman_at_healthgate.com)
Fri, 11 Oct 1996 09:36:48 -0400
As many will have seen, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece today
discussing NetCount's new "AdCount" service which monitors and
reports on ad impresssions and click-throughs. Of course, the Audit
Bureau (the people who should really be doing this) and others are
beginning to offer these services as well.
Given that reporting on impressions and click-through rates is
becoming more popular, I'm left wondering what compelling reasons
exist for providing overall site activity reports to advertisers or
anyone outside my company. My feeling is that advertisers should be
able to base their decisions on audited ad impression and
click-through data. The number of hits I serve to pages that don't
carry advertising shouldn't be of much interest to an advertiser...
Or, am I missing something?
The reason for the concern is that there is much valuable competitive
information that appears within overall site activity numbers. For
instance, at my site, we have a large number of pages (several
million) that don't display advertisements. If my competitors can see
my overall activity, they can extrapolate important data about my
revenues, market growth, etc. Unless there is a compelling reason to
provide this data to advertisers (and thus risk it falling into the
hands of my competitors) I don't think we publishers should provide
it.
Of course, impressions and clickthrough data also carries some risk
of revealing important data to my competitors. However, I feel that
this data is of such importance to advertisers that the risk of
revealing it is overcome by the benefit provided. As I've said
before, I don't think any advertiser should even consider working
with a site that can't show their impressions and click-through data.
In the world of publishing on paper, it wasn't possible to
distinguish between reporting on ad impressions versus total page
impressions. The fact that the publication is delivered as a unit
makes the two numbers largely equivelant (except for factors like
pages which are more commonly viewed.) Thus, paper publications have
always needed to report audited circulation numbers -- and their
competitors studied them carefully. In the online world, we *can*
distinguish between the two. While many of the "old" practices of
publishing move forward into the online world, I think this is one of
the ones that should be changed.
One intriguing aspect of all this is that if other site managers
think as I do, then companies like NetCount and I/Pro are going to
find that their business of doing overall site activity reports is
going to be significantly reduced in favor of the limited advertising
related reports. One wonders if they have factored this possibility
into their business plans... Or, are they just assuming that they
will get twice the business since they offer two kinds of report...
bob wyman
-----
HealthGate Data Corp.
<URL:http://www.healthgate.com/>
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