Topic Archive: Advertising

Some Very Modest Good News on Advertising and Ajax

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, February 28, 2008 @ 5:31 pm

Every month I check in on the state of advertising and Ajax. Nielsen has ditched the page view, but they've really shrugged their shoulders at how to measure traffic for advertising purposes on Ajax-enabled web sites. To make things worse, even Google, a pioneer in many things Ajax, is mum on Ajax and Adsense. Just search through their help forums for all of the unanswered questions on how to make Adsense work with Ajax sites. This deafening silence on Google's part (not even a "don't do it"), leads me to believe that they are either working on a solution but don't want to tip their hand, or that they are just as out to sea as everyone else.

So, the modest good news is that some people are working to solve the measurement problem. In the case of search recommendations, Baynote measures interest in the targets of search results, then reranks those results based on that interest. In other words, if someone goes to a search result, scrolls through the page, leafs through a couple of DHTML tabs, etc., then they probably found the page interesting. If, on the other hand, they only spend a second deciding that the page sucks, then go back to the search results, then they probably found the page uninteresting. 

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The Continuing Problem with Advertising and Ajax

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, July 2, 2007 @ 6:21 am

Over one year ago, Eric Picard wrote an excellent article reviewing the issues with Ajax and Internet advertising standards:

The current IAB impression-counting guidelines don't provide specific guidance on this topic. But they do offer general guidance on pages where advertising is automatically refreshed or reloaded. In the current audit process, every page that automatically refreshes will be treated as a unique case. The publisher must prove to the auditor that its business rules are justified. This means an immense amount of work on all sides during an audit, and decision-making criteria for every ad refresh scenario must be documented ahead of time for the auditors.

The current guidelines were last revised in September of 2004. The language in this document that might apply to Ajax is generally couched in terms of autorefresh pages, iframes, popups, popunders, etc., but it's far from adequate:

Good filtration procedures are critical to page-impression measurement. Additionally, consistent handling of auto-refreshed pages and other pseudo-page content (surveys, pop-ups, etc.) in defining a “page” and establishing rules for the counting process is also critical. These page-like items should be counted as follows:

• Pop-ups: ad impressions
• Interstitials: ad impressions
• Pop-unders: ad impressions
• Surveys: page impressions
• HTML Newsletters (if opened): page impressions if not solely advertising content, otherwise ad impressions
• Auto-Refreshed Pages: Site-set auto-refresh – page impressions subject to the following criteria — The measuring organization and user should consider: (1) whether the page is likely to be in background or minimized therefore diminishing the opportunity to view. If the content-type is likely to be in background or minimized while in use or the organization cannot determine whether minimization has occurred, these auto-refreshed pages may be assessed and or valued differently, and (2) that the refresh rate is reasonable based on content type. User-set auto refresh – Generally counted as page impressions.
• Frames: page impressions; organizational rules should be developed for converting frame loads into page impressions and these rules should be disclosed. One acceptable method is to identify a frame which contains the majority of content and count a page impression only when this dominant frame is loaded. These items should be separately identified and quantified within page-impression totals. Significant disaggregated categories should be prominently displayed.

As advertising driven sites face a decision on whether to lose pageviews in exchange for a better, Ajax-driven user experience, this gap between the standards and the current technology becomes ever more painful. Fortunately, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is starting to address this gap. This past May they released a draft of Rich Internet Application (RIA) ad measurement guidelines for public review.

The guidelines state that "In instances where significant user activity (click through and responding to mail, changing search options through clicking or typing, etc.) is present, this activity can be directly tied to ad-serving and counting provided that counting rules are defined in a consistent and fully disclosed manner." The guidelines go on to acknowledge that, "In special circumstances, due to the nature of the application, there may be no material user activity, for example, a single streaming event (e.g., financial tickers, sports game coverage, long single-stream video content)." For these types of environments, currently accepted auto-refresh guidelines should be applied including the consideration of user-set auto-refresh and for site-set rates, an assessment for reasonableness based on the rate and nature of the content as well as materiality.

Vague enough to be useful? And which of the service providers in the online ad biz are staying abreast of the RIA explosion? Well, it looks like the analytics folks like Ominiture and Google/Urchin are doing something about it, providing an API to allow RIA's to track user activity. In fact, they have been far out in front of the other service providers.

The audit folks are just starting to get on the bandwagon. Nielson has stuck a cautious toe in the water by announcing it would report time spent statistics in addition to pageviews starting in July.

At this stage of Web 2.0 development, it's clear that Total Minutes is the best engagement metric, because it provides a common denominator for user behavior that is independent of site design. This not only ensures fair measurement of those sites using RIA or streaming media, but also of Web environments like online gaming and Web-based applications and services that were never well-served by Page Views to begin with.

Snooze. More like "we can't really measure application activity right now, so we'll make do with what we can measure." You can't tell me that a page that sits on a background tab in a browser for hours is the same as a single page social networking app that is heavily used for 30 minutes. This is not good news, as it seems out of step with the IAB and will impede adoption of RIA's by content publishers. These publishers risk becoming irrelevant -- an online ghetto that will remain the last stronghold of the frequent postback.

What about the ad serving service providers? Do they have API's or other new features designed to work with RIA's? I don't have any good answers there yet. Since Google has been at the forefront of Ajax/Web 2.0 apps and actually dynamically loads adsense ads into into some of it's own RIA's, you would expect them to be very Ajax friendly. Not so fast.

Google's adsense terms of service are not exactly friendly to Web 2.0 and Ajax. It's all about "include the ads on the page and shut up." It's hard to believe this is the same company that pioneered Google Maps and GWT.

I'll be coming back to this issue time and again as the desire to build cool apps runs smack into the need to make money.

Technorati Tags: ajax, advertising, google, adsense, nielsen

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Again - Advertising and AJAX

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, June 9, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Eric Picard comments on the impact of AJAX on online advertising. He covers the basics as far as what the difficulties are:

AJAX
stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and it's the asynchronous
part that causes the problems. In Web pages created using AJAX, content
is loaded asynchronously with no browser refresh. This causes big
problems with counting page views and impressions: if a page never
reloads, it's difficult to define what a page view is. And if the page
is never reloaded, deciding when it's appropriate to refresh or load
new advertising is left to the developer's discretion. Similar issues
exist around software applications that include advertising.

That doesn't seem all that problematic, right? We can use AJAX to asynchronously load new ads. Further, we can drive advertising content off of user activity. Well, there's more to it than that. According to Eric, if your applications don't comply with industry standards, you will fail your impression audit which will adversely affect your ability to charge for online ads.

His solution? Avoid time based ad refreshing:

I've talked a lot with
people about time-based page refreshing and what's appropriate. This
isn't a new issue and is why the language exists in the current IAB
counting guidelines. But it's never been a simple one to deal with. My
general guidance is to avoid any kind of time-based advertising
refreshes if at all possible.

Event-based ad updating can be OK, it seems, if it corresponds to traditional webapp page loads. Should we root for a rapid update of the standards? Won't AJAX make the ads more intrusive, just like popups used to (and still do, in some cases)? Or can we hope that people will use the new technology to provide us with more pertinent offers?

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