All About... Online measurement

The medium is hardly 20 years-old and unlike its traditional siblings, online advertisers have yet to agree on a standard yardstick. As a result, Western-based companies from Google Analytics to the Interactive Advertising Bureau are rushing to take an authoritative lead. Nielsen created a media frenzy last month after it added ‘time spent’ metric to its popular NetRatings report, which had relied heavily on ‘page views’.

As a result, rival Comscore announced a new behavioural metric to its online net rankings less than a week later.

But while the online measurement debate roars overseas, the situation is much less clear in Asia, explains Mark Newton, CEO of digital media agency Qais Consulting. “We have to rely on our own expertise by experience to plan online media.”

1 Despite the surge in web 2.0 portals, such as Friendster and Facebook, many media agencies in Asia seem non-plussed about measuring the effectiveness of them and it’s often a judgment call by the marketer based on statistical trends and experience. “In Asia, time spent on a website isn’t the most important metric, audience is,” says Kenneth Wan, business director of MindShare Interaction Hong Kong. “Longer is better of course, but I wouldn’t optimise it. And I wouldn’t rely on any one metric or third party data.”

2 In fact, a month after Nielsen’s move, many agencies remain unfamiliar with the new metric. ‘Time spent’ simply measures the number of minutes a user spends on a certain site. “If advertisers want to reach engaged visitors, very interactive with site, this is very important,” says Elvira Lodewick, director of marketing and communications, Nielsen/Netratings Asia-Pacific. “But sites like Google, whose performance depends on its speed of delivery, will still adhere to measuring success through page impressions.”

3 Take online auditing, for example. Claimed traffic for major portals such as Google and Yahoo are audited by a number of third parties overseas, such as Nielsen and ComScore, but no such checks take place in Asia, apart from Australia. Instead, clients willingly recognise the web portal’s own figures. “How do you make sites here accountable?” asks Universal McCann regional interactive director Adrian Toy, “A key concern is what sites claim is really correct. ”

4 Yet markets are still pouring millions of dollars into the medium. A report from the Asia Digital Marketing Association predicts that China’s online ad spend will grow by as much as 50 per cent this year. South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are expected to have over 10 per cent of its total ad spend to be on the web by 2008.

5 In reality, many agencies examine an arbitrary combination of figures from companies such as Hitwise, Alexa and even ad serving company, Doubleclick. Toy thinks this method does not provide as much detail as offline. A suggested reason for the regional delay is that Asia is too fragmented to master — for now.

6 Meanwhile, the dated page view metric still dominates Asia. Page view counts the number of times an entire page is loaded. It’s more accurate than the click-through, but the page view count is quickly losing relevance due to the surge of media-rich portals such as YouTube. After all, a simple page load hardly guarantees that the user is paying attention to a display ad on the site, nor does it account for how engaged the user really is with the site.

7 And then there’s the rise of Ajax —  a development tool which allows data to refresh on a site without reloading the entire page. When you add a friend on Facebook, for example, a pop-up window comes up asking users to confirm. In the past, the process took users to three different pages.

8 Toy argues that the market is becoming saturated with matrices, even though it’s not necessarily clients looking for such data. Then what is the ideal metric? According to Toy’s colleague, senior regional interactive managerAlex Hau, it would be “an aggregation of all marketing touch points, plus user behaviour from an individual level.”

What it means for... Advertisers

Approach online data, even from third party sites, with caution. While there are innumerable players in this field, there is little transparency as to how information is gathered.

When looking at web analytic reports, consider each metric separately. In a Nielsen/Netratings report, for instance, the new ‘time spent’ metric downgrades click-and-go sites such as Google.com, which rely on speed of delivery for its success. However this metric is useful for choosing between media-rich sites such as online poker or email portals.

Work with an interactive team you can trust. After all, a significant part of online planning is based on the agency’s experience, not raw data.

... Agencies

Demand online audits from portals such as Yahoo and Google, who release their own web analytics in Asia. Too often, such figures are taken for face value.

If you haven’t already, familiarise yourself with media-rich sites, quickly. Your clients will want to start advertising on them, and the ‘time spent’ metric is just a sign that web 2.0 is here to stay for a while.