Time For A Single-Pixel Solution?

by David L. Smith, Nov 4, 2008, 12:30 PM

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Last Friday, Jim Stern wrote in this blog about the difficulty of getting people to undertake the measurement process. The human aversion to being measured. The feeling that you are being graded. And the difficulty in getting tags (pixels) up.

We've all run into these issues. Sometimes it is because a Web site is not really controlled by marketing but by IT and marketing initiatives that are not a high priority for the webmaster. In some cases the priorities are such that getting tags up must be put into a production queue. Then there are the concerns, sometimes real, that one more tag will cause latency in the site, affecting page loads and more. There are also issues on the marketing side, even when marketing does control the sites -- issues like that of the project stack and taking the time to do the work to get new tags up. Or even evaluating the merits of each different kind of tag. And there will be more, new and different kinds of tag requests coming in to facilitate new targeting and even newer tracking technologies. Where does it all end?

I recognize that the current time is such that getting your work done every day is the biggest issue. But it is also a chance for change. And if we can vote to change a whole country, we can certainly consider rebooting our tagging systems and creating something newer and simpler.

Back in the "old days" of the Web, a company called I/PRO, the first to measure and audit Web site traffic, had a concept called I-Code. This involved a universal registration. It was backed by the major players and was early enough in the game (1995-96) that it might actually have worked. If it had, we would not even need to use cookies the way we use them today. But a "professional" manager came in to run the company and took his eye off the I-Code ball to concentrate on sexier issues. It died a quiet death.

Today the technology exists to start over with a single universal pixel. I've talked with folks who know how to do this. I imagine that there are more out there. If and when this type of initiative gets funding, and I actually think it will, we'll need across-the-board industry support to test and implement. At first, this may appear to be even one more pixel, riding above all others. But in time, the technology does exist to create a universal pixel that could satisfy a number of needs. It would be great if this were open source -- and were created in such a way that as needs increase or are modified, that new code could be inserted within this one tag rather than adding more tags. Kind of like the Atlas Universal Action Tag on steroids. It would also need to have software built in that could optimize the calls made from the tag so that it was efficient.

We have the technology and the people smarts to do this. It would solve a huge industry problem. As the solutions become visible, let's rally and support them in the hopes that such a solution will solve at least one of the many pain points we have to fix to move our industry ahead.

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