• by Masha Geller , February 20, 2002

Despite the aborted merger with NetRatings and forecasts of an uncertain future, Jupiter Media Metrix today introduced a new service - Campaign Analysis. According to the announcement, it is a third-party service that measures and analyzes online advertising and marketing campaigns in real time.

Seth Segel, senior VP of JMM said that it is not uncommon for upwards of 50% of ad impressions to be disputed between advertisers and ad-serving agencies, and the new tool is designed to at least partially solve the problem. "Companies now can determine the exact number of impressions, the number of browsers the content appeared in, response rates and unduplicated reach and frequency,” he said, adding that the service "will help remove the ambiguity and skepticism over the definition of an ad impression by reporting only what is loaded in the Web browser, not what is served.”

JMM says it will be able to accomplish that by measuring and analyzing ad impressions as human viewers see them – in the actual Web browser - regardless of where the browser is located and who served the ad. Campaign Analysis will use a technology where a miniscule and transparent image is transferred with any Web page, email or advertisement. As that page, email or ad comes into view in a Web browser, Jupiter collects, counts and links that impression to a series of statistics and analyses.

Because Jupiter measures only what viewers see, rather than what is served, Campaign Analysis can work with any ad-serving technology. The company claims this is a far more accurate and useful approach than counting ads at different phases of the serving process, where the number of impressions that actually reach the Web browser can vary significantly due to slow dial-up modem connections, breakdowns in the ad-serving content, and intervention by humans who do not wish to have the content delivered.