• by Masha Geller , January 15, 2002

With much fanfare, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today issued a set of ad measurement guidelines for the industry to adopt and follow. Hailed by some as a "landmark," the guidelines are based on independently conducted PricewaterhouseCoopers study and input from the Advertising Research Foundation, Media Rating Council, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and Association of National Advertisers - quite a roster, wouldn't you say?

The guidelines deal with issues that have long plagued the online ad industry: measuring ad impressions, clicks, page impressions, and visitors and verifying ad delivery. Truth be told, they fall a little short of the mark in my opinion - too little, too late - but overall are a step in the right direction.

For starters, the IAB defined the ad impression, which is the "ultimate media currency" in their book, as "a measurement of responses from an ad delivery system to an ad request from the users browser, which is filtered form robotic activity and is recorded at a point as close as possible to the actual viewing of the creative material by the user browser."

Also, they suggest the industry agree that a click-through is a "user-initiated action of clicking on an ad element, causing a redirect to another web location." As for a page impression, the IAB says we should agree that it is a "a measurement of responses from a web server to a page request from the users browser." They also recommend that all robotic and spider activity should be filtered out of the final counts.

As for verifying ad delivery, the IAB suggests that site-side (i.e. publisher) data is integral to accurate measurement and reporting of interactive ad data. This suggestion is very likely to be rebuffed by advertisers and agencies, most of whom believe there is no better way to verify ad delivery than with third-party ad server data.

The specifics of all the guidelines and recommendations can be found at the IAB website, but it seems fairly clear that the IAB still has a lot of work to do to make these guidelines a true landmark.

As Brian McAndrews, CEO of AvenueA, said, "As currently written, these guidelines aren't calling for any significant change to the status quo."