Navigating Web Metrics
It's become a truism that the ROI on web advertising is easier to measure than that of traditional media. And, for the most part, that's true. But debate over the impact of click fraud has raised a cloud over search marketing. And, when you pull back the covers, you can see that PPM display advertising is not as scientific as some might believe.
Sarah Lacy at Business Week Online has an interesting story on the challenges of web metrics. While page views were never a great measure, new development approaches such as AJAX, along with the use of widgets and persistent toolbars make the page view concept even less relevant. As RSS proliferates, so will the challenge of determining what counts as a page.
Traditional media advertisers are having debates over whether to pay for eyeballs time-shifting their programming via Tivo. As more and more ad dollars move to the web, the old page-view model will need to be replaced by something that can factor in various usage models.
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