• by July 28, 2000

With great fanfare, interactive media buying service Global Network Incorporated yesterday announced the release of its "first" white paper dealing with website trafficking.

Aside from GNI's obviously over-hyped prediction of Internet ad revenues reaching 27% of total ad expenditures by 2007, the 21-page paper is a yet another document calling for web advertising standardization.

For example, the paper suggests that the variations of impression rates can be minimized to less than 10% if publishers, auditors, ad servers, and advertisers agree on setting standards. What a novel idea!

The paper also suggests that a study be conducted to find out how many impressions are optimal to create action on the part of the user (we haven't seen any new information on this in... well... over a day now!).

GNI also suggests the industry should find out how many users remember what web ads they see and how many users are influenced by web ads to go to a physical store to purchase products - apparently, recent research from AdKnowledge, AdRelevance and about three other firms isn't good enough.

The paper does make two questionably useful suggestions. In terms of counting ad impressions, GNI says all internal impressions by the web publisher (while generally negligible) should be excluded from the count. And, GNI says, since no human viewing occurs during the spider's visit (such as search engine mechanisms that scan the web periodically), hits generated by these spiders should not be counted.

Useful or not, the paper is at www.dgonn.com/tracking.html.