IAB Gives More Details of Key Meeting

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) will work to 'educate' the marketplace about the different ways of measuring web site traffic, the body revealed this week. The commitment was made as NetRatings and comScore both agreed to audit timetables at their recent closed doors meeting.

The IAB said the meeting, which it convened last week, was attended by an impressive array of industry organisations including the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, the Advertising Research Foundation, the Online Publishers Association, and the MRC.

Both measurement firms will submit their technologies and processes for audit by a third party. Nielsen//NetRatings will be moving ahead with a full audit and accreditation process with the Media Rating Council (www.mrweb.com/drno/news6801.htm ), while comScore is in the final stages of its pre-audit with the MRC and has indicated a commitment to finalising the timing for a full audit and accreditation within the next 90 days.

The IAB says it has agreed to work on updating standards for audience measurement and on marketplace education around the different ways that web traffic can be measured and audience composition and behaviour assessed. comScore, in particular, had responded bullishly to the Bureau's stated concerns about wide differences between the ratings produced by the two firms and figures seen in the basic site access logs common to all web sites, pointing out the potential for error in the latter. In April, comScore published the results of a study revealing that 'cookie deletion is a serious threat to the accuracy of Web site server logs, leading to overstatements in the estimates of unique visitors as obtained from server logs by a factor of as much as 2.5. A representative group of industry experts agreed with our conclusions.' The IAB's new commitment seems to recognise that the ratings firm has a point, and server logs are not so much a ratings reality check as another piece of the jigsaw.

The meeting was prompted by an open letter sent by IAB to the two firms asking them to submit to a third-party audit of their measurement processes (www.mrweb.com/drno/news6703.htm ). The two are online at www.nielsen-netratings.com and www.comscore.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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