Online advertisers are increasingly demanding independent, third
party validation of user population figures, click-through rates and
demographic data provided by website operators.
It comes amid uncertainty about the reliability of some of the
information currently being released to advertisers and agencies by Web
companies, because of talk that numbers and data can easily be
manipulated.
In addition, marketers want more precise demographic data of the types
of people surfing to specific web sites or portals to ensure that their
ad was actually reaching their intended target market.
Agencies have said that data manipulation did not seem to be a
widespread or growing problem.
However, they revealed that although they have come across only a few
"bad apples", those few cases - including the discovery of "robot" that
surfed the net and whose sole job was to artificially bump-up
click-through rates at a certain site - were enough to raise question
marks about figures provided by website operators.
Grey Interactive MD Vivian Lau said clients were putting on the pressure
for greater Internet accountability simply because the online budgets
were increasing.
"Gone are the days when advertisers were simply scrambling to be among
the first to advertise on the Internet.
"Now it has become more sophisticated. They are looking for very
specific data such as the number of people clicking onto their banner ad
and their demographic profile in order to calculate the CPM," she told
MEDIA.
She said that research such as Nielsen//NetRatings now being launched in
Asia-Pacific - but only in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia -
or Web audits like the one unveiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers would go a
long way to instill confidence among advertisers.
However, Ms Ruth Stubbs, Euro RSCG media director, direct and digital,
Grand China, said research and audits should have been set up a year
ago.
"The maturity of Asia is ramping up very quickly and we all could see
that a year ago, but independent research is not keeping pace," she
said.
Currently, companies such as 24/7 Media and Space Asia Media guarantee
that data released by Web operators is accurate.
But, Grey's Ms Lau said: "There isn't anything out there that can give
us an accuracy of within plus or minus five per cent."
She said that the typical online campaign used about five websites and
if a campaign did poorly it was incumbent on the agency to look through
all the sites one-by-one to find out what went wrong.
The result is that advertisers have shifted their focus to
outcome-oriented ads, because, according to Space Asia MD Colin
McIntosh, advertising on the Net is not cheap.
The average banner ad costs between US$10 to $35 every one
thousand times a page downloads, "so it can become very expensive if a
site claims half-a-million downloads a month".
However, he stressed that audit and tracking software was in place to
ensure that nothing underhand occurs.
