Who’s Auditing the Web?
Traffic figures for commercial sites are the basis of
e-business, but how reliable are the claims and whose claims can you believe..?
Internet Audience measuring is at the heart of e-business.
Just as traditional companies monitor their businesses with balance sheets,
on-line companies track the impact of their site through new media metrics.
Media owners need the data to measure the effectiveness
of their communication, to optimize their strategy through informed management
and to attract advertisers and investors. Media buyers need the data to
target their ads appropriately. Venture Capitalists and investors need
the data to gauge the potential of a business in which they may decide
to invest millions. And following the busting of the ‘dot com bubble’,
as pure players are increasingly turning to mergers with offline companies
as a route to survival, potential purchasers rely on those metrics to
determine how much they are prepared to pay for such businesses.
If standard definitions are not used, Internet metrics
are easily manipulated.
Commercial websites measure the amount of traffic to their
site by placing a software on their server that counts hits and logs audience
activity. Once the data is captured, the popularity of the site is measured
by standard terms of measurements (metrics), such as page impressions,
visits and user numbers. This method is known as site-centric, and it
has one inherent flaw: the data is captured, analyzed and later released
to the public by the interested parties themselves.
This is where standards and external audits come in handy.
Industry standards that allow people to compare like with like are already
in place. These standards are agreed across the industry and give definitions
of a user, visit, page impression and others. These were agreed in 1997
by audit bureaux in 32 countries.
Meaning of Metrics
According to a survey, 70-80% of companies do not use
the industry standards while analyzing data. It found that, the results
of the data gathered and analyzed by the companies are often misleading
because of the different ways each company defines the terms of measurement.
And if standard definitions are not used, these metrics are easily manipulated
to give a rosier glow to a site’s popularity.
According to the survey, some companies include the use
of internal site traffic, counting the pages opened by staff working on
a website. A number of sites count visits from automated shopping comparison
sites, and others may include non-requested frames within a frameset as
a valid page impression. Both of these measurements are banned by industry
standards.
Part of the problem seems to be that the internet is such
a new medium, people are still uncertain of the meaning of its terms and
figures, and many are unaware of the standards in place. Just like the
television, the internet is a complicated medium, and people need to invest
time in trying to understand how it works and what the different standards
are.
Facts Not Claims
Efforts are being made across the industry to promote
awareness of industry standards and to highlight the need for independent
auditing. Advertisers need to keep asking companies for independently
audited figures, the issue for them is "Are you happy to accept data
from anybody who hasn’t had it independently verified?" If you
buy a house you don’t just buy it on the basis that someone tells
you it is standing, you get an independent survey.
This doesn’t always appear to be the case at the
moment, as most advertisers do not ask for figures from websites to be
independently audited. The industry is so new and embryonic that no one
currently knows much about it.
Hence, in many cases, if you book a certain number of
advertisements with a site that hasn’t been independently audited,
you will find the site can’t deliver because the claim was overstated.
The inherent conflict of interest can and must be remedied
with audits.
However, on the up side, the sheer nature of advertising
on the net is helping to drive industry standards forward. Because advertisers
are buying click-throughs and not audience reach as they would with traditional
media, commercial sites are faced with the fact that unsubstantiated claims
can often be counter-productive when the site does not deliver.
User-centric methodology is used by internet measurement
companies such as Jupiter MMXI and Netvalue. The method requires these
companies to sample a representative panel of the internet audience, and
place a software on their computers that tracks their every move. User-centric
measurements carried out according to standards give a useful independent
view on internet trends and demographics, and when combined with externally-audited
site-centric measurements, the limitations of each method can be to some
degree surpassed.
But until external audits do become an integral part of
the monitoring of website traffic data and greater transparency is achieved
throughout the industry, the figures brandished by websites will lack
credibility and remain unreliable. At the moment, it is up to media buyers
and investors to decide which figures they can believe.
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