• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 16, 2011

What if advertisers relied on metrics to measure online advertising, reach and cookie deletion similar to those used to measure TV advertising? Ariel Geifman, principal analyst at MediaMind Research, says the company will create a platform for online advertising that measures reach and frequency similar to Gross Rating Points (GRP), a metric used to determine how many people viewed a show on television.

It will use the technology developed for cookie deletion as the basis for the platform to measure the cost of campaigns to help advertisers better allocate budgets. A sophisticated algorithm identifies when the cookie dropped on the user's computer or whether someone deleted it. The platform statistically adjusts for cookie deletion to project the true number of users who see the advertisement. The company released the complex mathematical algorithm in late January. It received IAB compliance for measuring reach under Audience Reach Measurement Guidelines.

The company reaches more than 700 million unique viewers worldwide, with thousands of advertisers using the technology, which works in the background. Advertisers don't need to change ads. Calculations get done on MediaMind's servers, says Geifman. Historically, the number of unique users estimated online meant counting the number of cookies placed on browsers, he says. "When the cookies were counted you might have got a million users seeing the campaign, but it wasn't accurate because it didn't take into account the cookies deleted," he says. "If I'm a user and I deleted a cookie, and another cookie got dropped in my browser after I deleted it when I saw another ad, the cookies might have been counted twice.

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