ACNielsen is rolling out Nielsen//NetRatings in Asia-Pacific to
track audience, advertising and user activity on the Internet.
The new service, which aims to bring accountability to the Internet
advertising arena for the first time in the region, is being initially
launched in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Hong Kong, Taiwan and
Malaysia will follow later this year.
ACNielsen media director Steve Garton said Nielsen//NetRatings will be
able to rank banner ads and sites and compile demographic profiles.
"Through Nielsen//NetRatings, we can build up a composite of Internet
users in the markets we are studying on a real-time basis, so not only
will we have an independent audit of numbers, we will also have a record
of who they are, where they went and how much time they spent at certain
sites," he told MEDIA.
The tracking is achieved via a "super cookie", which will be installed
in home and office computers with the user's permission.
Data on what the user is doing on the Web will be sent by the super
cookie to a central collection site in the US, in between uploading and
downloading data streams.
Several thousand people per country were expected to take part in the
study, Mr Garton said.
They will be picked from ACNielsen's NetWatch, a broad-based media and
consumption survey.
"We must have a large sample size because there are so many sites people
can visit. This way even smaller sites will have a representation in the
study," Mr Garton said.
He added that there was no problem in recruiting people to take part in
the survey because the study does not involve any effort on the part of
participants.
"We only have to install the cookie. The participants don't have to do
anything after that. And, we give an assurance that individual
activities are never revealed to ensure privacy, but that's a key ethic
in our business in that we never identify an individual in our surveys."
