When a Web site is served up onto a consumer's computer, with an advertising unit on the page, an advertising impression is created. Advertisers would like to buy those impressions. Even if the
consumer doesn't "click" on anything, there is value to advertisers in being able to reach people with a message.
Problem is, there are an infinite number of
impressions, which range in value from worthless to valuable, and when a Web site loads on a consumer's computer, they are all counted the same. This is a major issue for advertisers and content
owners. But I believe there is a way to prove the value of impressions, a task that should be number one on the "to-do" list of anyone in online publishing or advertising.
It might
seem odd that I believe we can prove the value of online impressions after I wrote last week about the problems with buying online media based on impressions. But I think the issue is not that
impressions are worthless, but rather that advertisers need an objective way to determine the value of impressions. There were many interesting responses to last week's post, but none of them
offered a solution to the real issue: How do you measure the value of online impressions? Or maybe even a better way to phrase the question: How do you measure the relative value of online
impressions?
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The answer, of course, is to create a system that can measure the relative value of impressions, a type of "ad unit rating system." Ideally, this rating system would be
run by a third party (like the IAB, Nielsen or comScore) that could bring together the largest online publishers (a number of which are very large offline publishers, ala The New York Times, CNN,
ESPN), all of which are struggling to support their cost structure due to the inability to demand premium values for their impressions. The ratings group could be a for-profit venture or a
not-for-profit trade association. Here's how the rating system would work:
1. The third party would be tasked with creating "tester ad units" with some sort of call to
action, like "click here if you are reading this." Ideally, it would be obvious to users that clicking on (or engaging with) the unit would not take them to a new page. The only goal of the
tester ad units would be to get people to complete the simplest of actions to indicate they have seen the ad unit. QUALITY OF CREATIVE WOULD NOT MATTER... we will get to that.
2.
The third party would then serve the tester ad units in place of online publishers' regular ad units to get a random sampling of people's "attention level" (I'd also call
this engagement level). The number of times these units would need to be served to get a good sample shouldn't affect online publishers' inventory for paying advertisers.
3.
Every publisher -- and, more important, each ad unit placement a publisher creates -- would get an "attention score." Perhaps of every one hundred people that see tester unit #1, 4 people do
the action. For the purposes of this example, we could give that ad unit an attention score of 4.
4. No attention score would be meaningful on its own, but would instead be used to
measure the relative value of impressions. For example: ad unit #1 got an attention score of 4, while ad unit #2 got an attention score of 2. Ad unit #1 could be considered twice as impactful
for advertisers.
5. Third party creates a market where advertisers can access ratings of ad units. Advertisers could then buy on CPMs, which would make a lot of advertisers very happy,
and publishers could sell on CPM. It is incredibly important that advertisers drive the initiative, because online publishers will follow the money.
Here's why this idea would work: it
doesn't matter how good the tester ad creative is, because all the creative is the same in the sampling. Advertisers are not paying for clicks, and can therefore focus on developing great creative
(that might not even ask to be clicked on), confident that people pay attention to the ad units where they are placing the creative.
There would be a lot of pushback from some publishers, but
I believe the framework is pretty straightforward. Google already uses "smart pricing" to discount small publishers who deliver poor-quality clicks, so why not figure out smart pricing for
impressions?
What do you think? Leave a note in the comments and drop me a line on Twitter www.twitter.com/joemarchese