VITAMEDIAS
Sizing up the web: The internet needs to sell itself to advertisers. And there are better ways of doing this than counting hits, clicks and page impressions
"The days of selling online advertising because it's cool are dead," says Bob Ivins, the research director at Yahoo! Europe. "You need to be able to sell facts like 'We reach the right audience' or 'We are cost effective' or 'We can measure brand equity more accurately'."
Still, some parts of the industry are still holding on to page impressions as their key measurement tool. "Page impressions are not the only arbiter, but they do have a use and also the UK industry is saying that this is what they want right now," says Richard Foan, managing director of ABCe, a UK industry-owned electronic media auditor specialising in census-style measurement such as page impressions. "Page impression is an easy metric to grab on to and it has a comfort zone because it has the word 'page' in it, but there is a lot of sophistication behind it like the length of time between impressions."
Knowing the number of page impressions is not a bad thing, but it can distort the whole media picture if viewed in isolation, says Walmsley. "The reason people are so obsessed with page impressions is because they are implying old media metrics. It's important to know the circulation of a newspaper if you're buying an ad because you're buying the whole circulation. But it's not important for a website because you're only buying a finite number of page impressions."
Pulver's view is that the jump to measurement using large internet user panels and away from simple counting of eyeballs needs to happen now.