Online advertisers in call for third-party validation

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.

Sign In

Trouble signing in?

Reset Password: Click here

Contact Customer Support at

Customerservice@campaignasia.com