• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, July 13, 2011

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has introduced a set of best practices for conducting online ad effectiveness research.

Written by Marissa Gluck of Radar Research, the guidelines are intended to provide the online ad market with a practical set of recommendations for standard operating procedures with respect to using ad effectiveness studies.

Among the planning-related recommendations are:

*To use online ad effectiveness surveys appropriately to make optimization decisions on an individual site, a study will optimally include at least 200 respondents.

*A 15-million impression campaign should be the minimum before a site should consider running a study on behalf of advertisers. A suggested "rule of thumb" is that the cost of an effectiveness study should be less than 10% of the overall buy.

*Agencies should include training and education for their media staffers not just on the mechanics and math of planning and buying, but also on the basis of research methodologies and implementations.