Move to end use of ‘hits’ for measuring audiences

Britain’s leading Website publishers took a further step towards adopting industry-wide standards on the measurement of Internet audiences at an informal industry forum last Friday.

Publishers and agencies represented at the meeting agreed in effect to ban audience claims based on Web page “hits”.

Continuing use of the measure, which aggregates each graphical item downloaded from a single Web page, has been increasingly criticised for giving a misleading and exaggerated picture of the actual level of traffic on Internet sites.

“Hits are now a no-no,” says Richard Holman, managing director of New Media Marketing & Sales, who arranged the meeting. “There was an agreement that the terminology of hits should be dropped, and that we should move towards adopting definitions of visits and page impressions.”

The informal grouping aims to meet again soon in the new year, with an open door policy for other interested parties.

Jonathan Newby, publishing director of IPC’s new media division, says: “It’s important to have some kind of informal forum where people can talk through issues and perhaps agree to standards and move towards consensus.”

He adds: “It’s definitely desirable to have some kind of industry body. But that is a longer term objective and was not the reason behind the meeting.”

Charlie Dobres, head of interactive at Lowe Howard-Spink, says he is pleased that both Web publishers and agencies appear keen to move quickly towards agreeing and adopting industry-wide audience measures.

“It is good to see that, in terms of looking at establishing agreement on industry-wide measures based around page impressions and visits, we all seem to be singing the same tune,” says Dobres. “We are talking about a medium that needs to grow up and have definitions with which everyone agrees.

“We don’t want to impose a narrow cost-per-thousand approach. But there should be some minimum agreed standards on measuring Internet audiences.”