NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> DEBATE: 4/22/98 - measuring impressions, digest # 08
ONLINE-ADS>> DEBATE: 4/22/98 - measuring impressions, digest # 08
richard_at_tenagra.com
Wed, 22 Apr 1998 16:36:13 -0500 (CDT)
How should our industry measure an impression?
4/22/98, digest # 08
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Contents
Panelists' Responses:
1.) Brad Aronson - i-Frontier
2.) Sean Pfister - CNET
3.) Neil Monnens - WebRep
Online Ads List Responses:
4.) Dave Prager - What about Branding
5.) Brian Alpert - New balance will emerge
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Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 15:12:16 -0400
From: Brad Aronson <brad_at_i-frontier.com>
Many of us seem to agree that an ad impression should count
when the ad is fully transferred (to the extent we can
measure that) as well as counting cached impressions (and
that spiders won't count).
The logistics of implementing this as an industry standard
would entail someone like the IAB supporting the initiative
as well as an extensive campaign to educate the industry.
Currently, advertisers who aren't selling something or who
don't have the goal of generating leads, most often use
click-through rates and cost per click to measure success.
Click-through isn't a good way to measure the success of a
campaign, but it's still the benchmark that most folks are
using. Counting cached impressions and eliminating spiders
(who (sometimes) click on everything) will significantly
drop click-through rates. This could have a negative impact
on the ad agencies and the publishers.
If some publishers use this measurement, their sites will
look as though they perform poorly, which may lead the
advertisers to switch their campaigns to other sites.
Advertisers, who suddenly see their click-through rates
drop, will not only consider the sites at fault, but also
their agencies. So, there must be an educational campaign
spearheaded by a third party (IAB?). The campaign would
explain the industry standard and why click-through results
will change. Ad prices could initially drop (I wouldn't want
to pay the same amount on sites that previously provided
cached ads free). So, how do the publishers benefit? Some
CPMs may drop, but many advertisers would feel comfortable
spending significantly more money on sites they could
compare and agencies would be likely to advertise on sites
where they knew they'd receive comparable results.
Also, this could lead to teaching the industry that
click-through shouldn't be the measure of success. I've seen
banners with incredibly high click-through rate that have
resulted in most users leaving the advertiser site after
looking at the home page. In these cases the users weren't
interested in the advertiser's content, so the click-through
wasn't valuable. To help gain widespread acceptance for an
industry standard that would decrease click-through rates,
we would benefit from another educational process to teach
advertisers (and perhaps some agencies) that click-through
isn't the real measure of a campaign's success. Perhaps
three page views, a registration, an order, an impression,
or some other action that can be tied to a publisher's goal
could be used as a benchmark. These are the types of factors
that drive what I'd pay to advertise on a site.
-----------------------------POST NUMBER 2
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 16:32:45 -0700
From: Sean Pfister <seanp_at_cnet.com>
Don Westrich <don_at_thethinkingmedia.com> wrote:
>The hierarchy of ad delivery, in order of increasing
>importance to advertisers, runs like this:
<snip>
> 6. ads that result in a sale.
>...
>Metrics like cost of customer acquisition blow the utility
>of impressions away. As banners that are a true venue for
>customer contact and capable of sales become more common,
>impressions will become less and less relevant.
A model in which individuals move step-by-step from a state
of disinterest to active purchasing is convenient, but
human behavior is much more complex. People, fortunately,
don't function like computers. That's why advertisers spend
so much time and money on branding campaigns. Ultimately,
the purpose is sales, but the branding effect can't always
be tied to some well-defined ad campaign.
This is true in other media, and I expect it to be true
online as well. Sometimes the main purpose of an ad is to
create affinity, to reinforce behavior; to simply show the
product.
____________________________________________________
Sean Pfister
Director of Research and Analysis
seanp_at_cnet.com
Tel: 415/395-7805 x1529
FAX: 415/395-7814
http://www.cnet.com
-----------------------------POST NUMBER 3
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 18:39:21 -0700
From: Neil Monnens <nmonnens_at_webrep.net>
Since we have all the players in the AMS (ad management
software) field gathered here, I would like to make a plea
to the measurement companies to cooperate with one another.
A common situation: Ad Agency (LeftField) for client
(Amazon.com) contracts with Ad Management Service
(Matchlogic) to run an ad on a web site
(Entrepreneurmag.com) which uses Ad Management Service
(Focalink). We now have five parties involved with serving
an ad campaign. Entrepreneurmag has a gif file on the same
page as the ad banner. Entrepreneurmag views the stats to
see the gif file registering 10,000 impressions a day while
Focalink is only counting 8,000 a day. The advertiser gets
the numbers back from Matchlogic and only shows 5,000
impressions a day. What happens? Each company claims to
count correctly, pointing a finger to their competitor as
the company that is not counting correctly or not using the
right tags, or using the wrong headers, etc...
Each time an ad management service gets involved, the
problems rise exponentially. Let's assume all companies
involved use the same counting method for this example: A
user (in New York) of the site goes to Entrepreneurmag.com
(Irvine, CA) and reads the editorial and the gif file loads
(both from Irvine, CA). A request goes to Focalink (Palo
Alto, CA) for the ad banner which is then told to go to
Matchlogic (Denver, CO) to get the banner which then gets
sent back to New York. By that time, the user could be gone
from the page. If you have ever performed a trace route,
you will know that there are more hops that took place than
the four I mentioned here. I get 9 hops between San
Francisco and Palo Alto <
http://www.noc.geo.net/cgi-bin/nph-trace-plus >.
So if you are a web site selling out your inventory each
month, do you take a banner from an advertiser who uses a
third party (or serve their own ads) and lose money, or just
refuse the ad?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Neil Monnens (mailto:nmonnens_at_webrep.net)
WebRep, LLC.
1850 Union St., Suite 1149
San Francisco, CA 94123
Tel 415 440-3494
Fax 415 922-8815
Client list: < http://www.webrep.net/Pages/list.html >
-----------------------------POST NUMBER 4
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 14:29:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Prager <dsprager_at_mailbox.syr.edu>
Don Westrich <don_at_thethinkingmedia.com> wrote:
>
> 1. Ads served (what most systems count) > 2. Ads
> successfully transferred > 3. ads displayed (what we define
> as an impression) > 4. ads viewed (per Chris Redlitz) > 5.
> ads that get a click through > 6. Ads that get a more
> detailed response (i.e., the surfer telling you something
> substantive about themselves, types in a keyword, supplies
> an E-mail address, etc.) > 6. ads that result in a sale.
>
>
> But #5 & 6 begin to transcend advertising and become direct
> marketing. I submit that 5 & 6 are the grail for
> advertisers.
#5 & 6 are the grail for advertisers if the advertiser is
selling a product. For someone like Amazon.com, linking
banner success to sales is a perfect measure of banner
efficiency.
However, what about companies that are advertising primarily
for brand building? Nike, Absolut, Levi's, you name it, the
goal of their advertising is primarily to build an image and
brand loyalty, secondarily to generate sales. So, since the
success and efficiency of an Absolut campaign is based on
much more than immediate sales, impressions and click-thru's
will be more important than sales generate by the ads. Even
if the consumer simply sees the ad without clicking, there
is value - Absolut receives more value from an "impression"
(however it is defined) than Amazon.com would.
So, if a site is involved directly in selling something,
than yes, 5 & 6 are their holy grail. But the value of 5
and 6 is not as great for brand building sites - they rely
more on net impression (that is different than
"impressions") of their advertising and their site than
sales generated by ads.
> Metrics like cost of customer acquisition blow the utility
> of impressions away. As banners that are a true venue for
> customer contact and capable of sales become more common,
> impressions will become less and less relevant.
Again: the goal of brand building sites is not necessarily
customer acquisition or sales, but rather for building image
and brand loyalty. These are not things that can be
measured by cost of customer acquisition or any short-run
sales data.
Dave Prager
General Manager
Orange Source - source.syr.edu
dave_at_source.syr.edu
-----------------------------POST NUMBER 5
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 15:17:44 -0400
From: Brian Alpert <balpert_at_telogy.com>
All --
I think it is important to define a standard of what an
impression is, and advance the technology for accounting for
them, if for no other reason than to advance credibility of
the industry as it reaches new markets, and better enable
advertisers and their agents to measure their efforts and
objectives.
But I also believe associated questions of click-through and
cache, and how these variables do or should affect the value
of an impression are moot in the context of the technical
discussion. They are market-driven.
Advertising is worth so much to ad buyers, and ad sellers
can only charge so much. Though this traditional balance is
still somewhat in flux, standards are quickly emerging. It's
only a matter of time before the general marketplace is
sophisticated enough to know what is fair, and what is too
dear.
When technology and standards make it clear to buyers that
robots/spiders account for 13% of served impressions, cached
ads are comprising 37% additional impressions (or 674%,
whatever) and a "normal" CTR for a 12 week campaign is
0.26%, not 1%, then a new balance will emerge based on these
standards.
As the value of a single impression goes down, advertisers
will by default buy more of those impressions, to gain the
same benefit they're currently gaining (or what they will
perceive to be appropriate, based on what they are able to
learn between now and then).
Advertisers will not spend 674% more dollars on ads, and ad
sellers will not be able to charge 674% more. Web ad budgets
may, ne, will go up, but only because of increased
perception in the corporate environment, not because buyers
must now suffer the burden of paying for cached ads when
before they were free byproducts of inferior accounting.
The industry's enhanced credibility and the greater spending
that ensues will occur in no small part because discussions
like this lead to greater accounting and credibility.
--Brian Alpert
Manager Internet Marketing
Telogy Networks, Inc.
<http://www.telogy.com>
<http://embeddedsoftware.com>
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This week's Online Advertising Discussion List sponsor:
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More brand-name sites. 13 content channels. That's what you get from
the fastest growing online network. Let our media professionals help
you develop a winner plan. 24/7 Media - Always Serving You
http://www.247media.com
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