At our last meeting, we talked about the problem of properly counting hits
on Web pages, so I thought there might be some interest in this MSNBC
story.
Regards,
Norm
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> A truer Web census?
> Software company says it can solve the caching dilemma
> By Jane Weaver
> MSNBC
> Summary:
> There's a phantom audience prowling the Internet. We're not
> talking about ghosts, but groups of people looking at Web
> sites, and the ads on those pages, who are undetected by
> online publishers. These page views go uncounted because of
> an industry practice called caching. It could be costing
> Web publishers a lot of money. But one software company
> says it has a solution.
>
> THE INTERNET REACHES anywhere from 19 million
> households to some thirty-odd million users
> in the United States, depending on the
> research source. Even within individual Web
> sites, true audience numbers have been hard
> to come by, partly because everybody
> translates their traffic data in a different
> way. Industry experts have long suspected
> that a large number of actual computer users
> - or at least the number of pages they look
> at - has been hidden by cached pages.
> Caching is what happens when Internet
> service providers, America Online or
> individual wired corporations copy and store
> Web pages internally. That way, when multiple
> users call up a single Web site, Internet
> bandwidth isn't used up with repeated
> requests for the same information. Caching
> helps keep the Internet speedier, but it's
> bad news for Net content providers that want
> to know how many people saw their pages - and
> ad banners.
> A small Colorado-based Internet
> company, Matchlogic, claims to have solved
> the problem with new software developed at
> the request of Detroit auto giant General
> Motors, and its vice president of advertising
> and marketing, Phil Guarascio. Matchlogic has
> been handling Internet ad placement for all
> GM brands since 1996, and the automaker has
> been pushing the startup to find a solution
> to the Web's audience-measurement problems.
> Guarascio wants to find out whether
> Internet audiences are big enough to warrant
> increasing its investment in online
> marketing, sources say.
> What Matchlogic found was that about
> two-thirds of Web site traffic is going
> uncounted, claims president Peter Estler.
> When Matchlogic ran a test of a
> General Motors ad campaign, its software
> revealed that on the most heavily trafficked
> sites - such as search engines at peak times
> - audiences were undercounted by more than
> 600 percent, says Estler.
>
> VASTER AUDIENCE?
> Whether TrueCount's technology reveals
> that the increased number of page views
> translates into more individual users
> accessing the Web hasn't been determined yet.
> That information is still being evaluated,
> says Estler.
> But the executives who control where
> advertisers spend their interactive budgets
> believe that, if the technology can be
> verified by an independent auditor, the
> result could be increased confidence in the
> effectiveness of Web advertising, translating
> into more money spent in online media.
> "Over the longer term, the more
> comfort that people in the industry have with
> the accuracy of what's really going on, the
> more likely that ad numbers are going to
> migrate [higher]," says John Nardone, media
> director at Modem Media, a well-regarded
> interactive agency.
> In the next few weeks, Matchlogic
> expects to get the seal of approval from the
> Audit Bureau of Circulations, one of the most
> trusted auditors in the publishing industry.
> ABC, which certifies the reliability of Web
> site traffic numbers, will license the
> TrueCount technology for its clients, says
> Estler.
> Web publishers have long suspected
> that a portion of their audiences weren't
> being represented by their log files.
> "The need to get as accurate a count
> as possible is something we endorse across
> the board," says Daniel Rosensweig, president
> of ZD Net, which employs its own
> cache-busting techniques. "We believe that
> Matchlogic is onto something that the
> industry needs to pay attention to."
> At Hotwired, the internal estimate was
> that 20 percent to 30 percent of the site's
> traffic was undercounted because of caching.
> "Apparently there's a hell of a lot more
> caching going on," says Rick Boyce, senior
> vice president of advertising at Hotwired.
> "When you aggregate it all, it's pretty
> dramatic."
>
> PROVING VALUE
> Agency executives are demanding that
> sites focus their attention on getting more
> accurate data about Internet audience
> traffic.
> "We need a better qualification of the
> Internet audience, " says Lynn Bolger,
> interactive media director at Ammirati &
> Puris Lintas.
> While Web advertising has been
> steadily growing, reaching $343.9 million in
> the first half of 1997 according to the
> Internet Advertising Bureau, it's critically
> important that advertisers feel they are
> getting what they pay for, ad agency
> executives say.
> "Because of the accountable and
> technological nature of this medium, there
> have been a lot of demands and expectations
> to have a 100 percent measurable audience,"
> says Kathleen Sheridan, media director at
> Brand Dialogue, the consolidated online unit
> of Young & Rubicam and Wunderman Cato &
> Johnson.
> "What we're dealing with now is the
> [audience] projection," comparable to what
> Nielsen ratings do in television, says
> Sheridan. "We should be pushing for 100
> percent accountability, but we're not there
> yet."
> Improved measurement is of particular
> concern to consumer marketers, who spend a
> majority of their ad dollars on brand or
> image campaigns and don't expect to generate
> a lot of click-throughs or sales online.
> "Branding clients are in and out of
> the medium because they don't get measurable
> information," says Steve Klein, media
> director at Kirshenbaum & Bond, New York.
> "For them, interactive is the first cut in a
> budget."
> In fact, in the pursuit of a better
> audience profile, executives from Procter &
> Gamble have said publicly that the
> advertising giant will spend as much research
> and development money on figuring out Web
> audience measurement as on actual media
> buying in 1998.
> "We're not sure there's any proven,
> winning ways of measurement to date because
> the medium is so new," says a P&G
> spokeswoman. "But we're trying to figure out
> how to do measurement because it's incredibly
> important to know if our messages are
> meaningful and if consumers are seeing them
> and understanding them, and if they are
> effective." Although the spokeswoman declined
> to comment specifically on Matchlogic, she
> confirmed that P&G is part of a newly formed
> consortium, along with Chevrolet, IBM, Kodak
> and Levi Strauss, organized with the
> interactive division of media research
> company ASI to study the nature and effect of
> advertising on the Internet.
> But beyond straight audience counting,
> Madison Avenue and advertisers like General
> Motors also are asking for demographic and
> psychographic information from Web
> publishers.
> "As we move our brand management
> process forward and we drive for specificity
> in how we market individual brands, we need
> to know if we're hitting the right
> demographic," says GM spokesman Dean Rotondo.
>
> The caching issue gets to the how
> many, but it doesn't tell agencies who the
> users are.
> "We really want to be looking at who
> we're targeting and who is responding," says
> Sheridan.
> http://www.msnbc.com/news/117126.asp