• by Paul Gough , September 3, 2002

Online auditor ABC Interactive will soon offer a service that offers enhanced tracking of website visitors, providing a general picture of where they’re located geographically.The service has been named Geographical Analysis. It’s going to be marketed within the next week or two and will be working for some clients by the end of November, ABCi says.

ABCi is the online arm of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, providing verification of online media activity. ABCi serves websites, search engines, email systems, Internet broadcasters and ad servers. ABCi’s clients include Yahoo!, Cnet and AOL plus newspaper websites like the Detroit Free Press and the Houston Chronicle.

Dick Bennett, ABCi’s SVP of information technology auditing, says the new geographical component was sparked by calls requests from buyers. “They said they’d find more value in obtaining more information for deeper levels of detail auditing activity by channel to understand more about the users of the site,” Bennett says.

The service will work have two components, a U.S. Analysis that parses activity by states within each of the nine Census Bureau Divisions, and an International Analysis that details activity for the top 25 countries based on page impressions. The data is analyzed for a one-day period and can include page impressions, unique users, visits, ad impressions and click-throughs.

ABCi reviewed several companies’ offerings before picking Quova Inc., a two-year-old California firm that provides the geographic location of website visitors in real time. Quova says it uncovers location information that had been previously masked by proxies without using cookies, profiling or click-stream data.

"The technology of geographical analysis allows for a much more accurate portrayal of geographical auditing understanding that has been previously capable,” Bennett says. The technology isn’t tuned enough to be able to provide information to the city or regional level but that will come at some point, he says.

But the geographic service will aid planners and buyers in their work. "It helps them to understand characteristics about auditing which tells them whether the site is appropriate to buy advertising on,” he says.