January 3, 2006

Ask eCommerce experts and some will tell you that, on any given day of the week, on average, Internet users around the world visit about 15 billion Web pages.

That's a very large audience for Internet advertisers wanting to deliver their ads on some of the most-visited Web sites.

However, precisely calculating how many individuals visit any one site in particular is a daunting task.

To that end, the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) wants to develop the Nomenclature Project, in an effort to provide a more standard and more reliable measurement of Web analytics and measurement.

Various research groups, marketing and advertising agencies, and even the sites in question measure traffic differently. Some groups use a representative sample of Internet traffic to make extrapolations about demographics and surfing habits.

The sites themselves can use software that lets them track actual traffic, in real time.

Compare that with the method for measuring TV viewership. In the TV industry, ratings are determined by a representative sample. While some may disagree about the measurement's accuracy, it's still a standard -- and shows are rated accordingly.

An advertiser wanting to know how many people watch "Desperate Housewives" gets one straight answer.

But let's say an advertiser wants to know how many people go to Yahoo's portals and sites on any given day. An array of answers is likely. And as the Internet evolves, these answers are getting more and more confusing.

Sites like Yahoo News aggregate content from a variety of sources, from bloggers to major publications and media outlets. When a user calls up a particular item, who gets to lay claim to that view -- or, to use Internet parlance -- that eyeball?

Online advertising has been exploding, rising 25 percent in 2005. As advertisers consider shifting more dollars online, they want solid numbers -- not approximate estimates.

The Nomenclature Project is one of many efforts at standardization the IAB has undertaken. In some ways, it's very elementary. It seeks to establish a common set of rules, or nomenclature, to determine what counts as a site's "eyeball."

Other attempts deal more directly with how Internet publishers actually charge for ads, says IAB Chief Executive Greg Stuart. The Nomenclature Project seeks to define Web sites by who is looking at what.

Unlike the arenas of TV or print advertising, that's not how advertisers pay online. They pay per actual impression, or clicks -- not just for raw audience.

The final standard still isn't here, and the IAB isn't ready to disclose the details it's considering.

When completed, the project is likely to have an impact on ad strategies and budgets. Marketing managers and advertisers organize a branding campaign around exposure, and without reliable Web traffic to compare with TV, radio, or print, it has been difficult to fit Internet advertising into a campaign's strategy.

Such haziness has caused some big advertisers to shy away from online ads, experts say.

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Why the reluctance? The Internet may be too radically different from traditional media. It's a positive in that the Web's interactive nature provides advertisers a unique ability to track and target potential customers.

Additionally, new and innovative types of ads are created everyday, including so-called "rollovers" that expand when a cursor moves over them, talking animated characters, and video ads.

But the flip side of all of the data and fast-moving innovation is confusion and complexity. Unlike the steady offline-media world, the Web is constantly morphing.

The IAB is navigating on one side between traditional marketers and brand builders that want online advertising in terms and metrics they can understand, and interactive agencies and technologists on the other who say imposing such strict standards will kill what makes the Web so powerful and unique.

The Nomenclature Project strikes a compromise. It doesn't seek to price advertising in old-media terms such as sheer audience, but instead it will give marketers reliable numbers to use for justifying pulling advertising from print or TV to put online.

It's a way to compare apples with apples. For websites, this is key to drawing a bigger share of advertisers' wallets, even if it relies on measures used on more traditional, or old-economy, industries.

"At a minimum, you need to have a dataset that is easily comparable with traditional media," says Adi Kishore, director of Yankee Group's media practice.

David Hallerman, senior analyst for research firm eMarketer, agrees. A lot of the detailed data that Web sites give on user activity is overload, he says. Most marketers just aren't sophisticated enough to even know what to do with it.

Hallerman compares the Internet to the 'nerd kid' in class who may have interesting things to say, but may have trouble getting people to listen to it all.

"In some ways the online-ad industry might have to sacrifice a level of detail in order to have greater simplicity of measurement, making it more palatable for traditional advertisers and agencies," Hallerman explains.

So if the Nomenclature Project succeeds in establishing standard ratings, advertisers will more easily be able to make decisions on how to allocate resources between the Web and other media.

From there, they can drill down into more specifics that affect the actual price of ads.

Also, plans are under way to provide more standardization in other areas, according to Stuart. He says a more important project is devising a standard, auditable definition for "serving," or delivering, an ad.

After all, that's what advertisers actually pay for. "We're basically creating a whole new medium here," Stuart says. "It takes time."

But old-economy marketers may just be stalling the inevitable. As the Internet evolves, it'll become harder, not easier, to measure a brand's reach in magazine or TV-like metrics.

Emerging Web design trends such as "mashups" that put together two sites are blurring the boundaries between properties even more than content-sharing partnerships do today.

Moreover, many Internet evangelists, like John Cate, national media director for ad agency Carat Interactive, are loath to throttle such innovation in the face of standardization.

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"This industry changes greatly every three to six months, and I don't want to lose that," Cate says. Instead, he expects old-economy media to start looking more like the Web.

For instance, broadcasters could use video on demand or digital-video recorders to track what people are actually watching and sell advertising based on that kind of data, not just ratings.

With such large stakes and so many constituencies -- some pushing for change, some resisting it -- it's no wonder the seemingly simple Nomenclature Project has taken two years, and may well take another year before the standard is widely deployed, if ever.

Not everything, it seems, is faster in cyberspace.

Source: eCommerce Times