INTERNET WATCH
It is almost impossible to gauge the audience for an Internet site but counting methods are emerging to address advertisers’ need for accountability. Frank Harrison is media information systems director at Zenith Worldwide
If anybody tries to sell you space on their Internet site on the basis of the number of user “hits” first make sure you know precisely what you are being sold. Total site “hits” are a very misleading guide to the size of a site’s audience, often overstating the actual audience by multiple factors in excess of hundreds.
The simple truth is that hits are an aggregate count of the number of files in a site that are opened by users when they visit the site – every picture/graphic on a page is a file and every page of text is a file. So, if a page contains some text and six pictures, a count of seven hits is recorded when the user accesses the page.
If a surfer surfs through 15 similar pages in a site they personally clock up 105 hits in one visit.
Many sites can count well over 1,000 hits for a single visitor in a single visit! Total site hits, therefore, are highly misleading.
Unfortunately, in the absence of an acceptable independent audit, overstatement of audience to sites is rife, seriously damaging the credibility of the medium at a time when it needs to be as accountable as possible.
There are a number of alternative audience measurement tools worth looking at. The first is the “session identifier”. This allocates a unique number to each user arriving at a site and can therefore be used to count the actual number of site visits accurately. Additional tracking can be done through the use of “cookies” – software within a site which can do a variety of things automatically, and without the user knowing, such as track the user’s clicks through every page of the site. This can be used to give a reasonable estimate of the count of individual page visits and users. Cookies can also be used to personalise a site automatically for a user. However, without widespread standardised use (there are ethical and legal issues also to be taken into account), there is as much scope for misleading advertisers with “cookie” counts as with hit counts.
Independent auditing of Internet sites is a market gap waiting to be properly filled. The most obvious contenders are those companies already engaged in media auditing, yet no company has successfully implemented a suitable – and acceptable – measurement standard.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the US (http://www.accessabc.com/) and in the UK (http://www.abc.org.uk/) are, with their well-established auditing status in the print medium, unsurprisingly emerging as the lead players in this field. The US company has just launched an Internet auditing service (June 5), while the UK ABC plans to launch an audit later this year.
For advertisers looking to place banners which, when clicked, link the user to their own sites, there are two counts that every seller of Internet space should, and can easily, provide. The first is a count of the hits of the banner graphic file itself – this counts the number of opportunities visitors have to see the banner. The second is the number of clicks on the banner (this can also be counted automatically at the advertiser site). Independently auditing both these counts is also perfectly possible.
A combination of cost-per-thousand opportunities to see a banner and cost-per-thousand clicks on the banner may yet emerge as an acceptable advertising pricing method for this emergent medium.
