AUTHOR: Russell TITLE: View-Through and You DATE: 10:43 AM ----- BODY:
In a recently released update to its earlier study called "Natural Born Clickers," the web traffic research firm comScore presents an eye-popping indictment of online display ad click-throughs.

Using click-through rates as an advertising performance metric has frustrated B2B publishers for years. B2B audiences tend to be small by online standards. This, of course, is by design, since B2B publishers present highly specialized content targeted at specific, high-value audiences. Inherently, then, B2B publishers will never look that impressive when measured by click-through rates, but advertisers and their agencies want to see big results from their advertising investment. And why the focus on click-through rates as a performance metric? In the candid words of one agency professional, because "clicks are easy to understand and easy to measure."

Keeping in mind that this comScore study is B2C research, one key finding speaks volumes: only 8% of Internet users account for 85% of all click-throughs. And who are these heavy clickers? It's a generally younger and less affluent crowd, suggesting that the clicks-throughs that advertisers covet may not even represent good prospects.

Most significantly, comScore was able to document that online display advertising provides concrete branding value. Site visitors who see a display ad impression are demonstrably more likely to visit the advertisers' website and search on an advertisers' trademarks within a month of being exposed to an online display ad from the advertiser.
That's why there is a growing movement out there to shift measurement from "click-through" to "view-through." In English, "view-through" roughly translates to "ad impressions." Yes, it's been a long, rough, painful ride, but it does seem we've come full circle: display advertising against a targeted, engaged audience delivers real value to advertisers. Who knew?

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----- -------- AUTHOR: Russell TITLE: Measure for Measure DATE: 2:38 PM ----- BODY:
The Internet is "the most measurable medium," so perhaps not surprisingly, it's also the most measured medium, too. The problem is nobody's measurements ever seem to match, and sometimes they are not even in the same ballpark.

There are a number of reasons online measurement is such a mess. First, even at this late date, we're not all speaking the same language. Just last week, I heard one publisher proudly touting the number of "unique visits" (think about that one for a second!) they had achieved last month. And I still frequently hear about the number of "unique hits" this site or the other is experiencing. Until we get the language right, we have no hope of getting the measurement right.

Then there's the measurement process itself. A newly released study by Comscore suggests that so many users are now clearing the cookies on their computers that many sites are vastly over-reporting their unique visitors. Also this week is a report in the Wall Street Journal that Neilsen is dropping good old dependable pageviews as a reporting metric. Why? New Web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax deliver content in ways that the traditional pageview metric doesn't measure, meaning that sites will increasingly be under-counting pageviews while over-counting unique visitors.

Even more scary, this is just this week's news. There's been a steady drumbeat of reports pointing up the weaknesses of existing web analytics.

In short, Web technology is changing faster than measurement technology. This suggests that in the coming years, publishers that can describe their audience (through online registration or even companion print publications) will start to have a real competitive advantage over those who only quantify their audience in web-centric terms.


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