The piece on viewthrough and how to more accurately measure it in last week's Metrics Insider was appropriate from a timing standpoint. And as Paul Harvey was fond of saying on the radio: "Now, for the rest of the story."

One of the biggest challenges the online advertising industry faces is how to account for viewthrough conversions. For people who are new to the landscape, there are two types of conversions resulting from an online ad campaign: clickthrough and viewthrough. Clickthrough conversions are those conversions that happen after a user clicks on an ad. Unlike clickthroughs, viewthrough conversions happen when a user is served an ad upon visiting the publisher site. These conversions are differentiated from clickthroughs by the fact that the individual did not click on the ad even though the conversion did occur at a later time. For …

Last week David Smith, with whom I share this space on alternate Tuesdays, wrote a piece calling Quantcast "the Next Generation of Media Research." I found myself disagreeing with this characterization -- perhaps not an entirely surprising response from the Chief Research Officer at comScore. Fortunately, I get my own column to offer a slightly different perspective, so hear me out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've heard this before, right? This time it is for real -- and I vouch for it because I was directly involved from the WAA side and personally involved in every email and phone call that took place to actually bring this effort to fruition.

While not a brand-new offering, Quantcast represents the next generation of media research and is worth checking out. I have written about Quantcast in passing over the last year or two (full disclosure, I did some early consulting for them and have a small number of stock options), and I find that many agency-side and publisher-side folks that I talk to are unfamiliar with their services. Quantcast merits attention and today, I'll tell you why.

The most recent MetricsInsider article by Josh Chasin describes the excellent work of Young-Bean Song of Atlas in engagement mapping. Based on the eminently logical idea that there are many sources we turn to along the way to making a purchase decision, an engagement map proposes to look at the complexity of influence in digital media. It's not just about the "last click," which of course is very often Google.

Last week I moderated the "Metrics Maelstrom" panel at Ad:Tech. A couple of key themes emerged from panelists Jon Gibs (Nielsen Online), Young-Bean Song (Atlas), and Beth Uyenco (Microsoft, and new co-chair of the IAB Research Council.) One of these themes was the need to understand the relative roles and impacts of the broad plethora of marketing communications to which a consumer is exposed.

Measuring click-throughs, pageviews and revenues is revealing, but it's a bit like asking an in-store shopper how well they like your store based on the time of day they came in, which aisles they went down and how much they bought. Figuring out if they enjoyed the experience is a different story. Recency and frequency can give you some insights about loyalty and time on-site might be indicative of a positive visit, but you won't be able to measure whether your visitor thinks your site is great or ghastly unless you ask them.

For the last couple of years, I have been writing and speaking about the need for media dashboards. Now we're in the final process of evaluating a slew of dashboard options. To someone who has not gone through the pain of adopting a new technology for the media market, the general feeling, based on the demos that are being shown by these vendors, is that it's just like the Staples campaign: getting a dashboard is akin to pressing the easy button. In many cases, the companies will give you a month or two or three for free, so there is …

My wife and I are big fans of the" Law & Order" franchises -- those erstwhile crime dramas on NBC and most cable networks that feature, as creator Dick Wolf puts it, "A universe of characters." We've noticed, through studied observation, that there are six or seven common, recurring themes to the "Law & Order" plotlines. One of these is, "The Internet is evil." (Another is, "Never screw with the Russian mob.") In an early episode of "Law & Order: SVU," Stabler is explaining to his young teenage daughter why he reads her email. "Now they're coming in through there," …