We are pleased to notify you of the release of two new modules, Extended Duplication within Market Intelligence and Demographics for SiteCensus.

Extended Duplication is an extension of the existing Duplication module and allows users to understand the reach across up to 15 sites.

Objectives

• Add the Nett UB for the group
•  Add the Exclusive UB reach for each asset within the group
•  Assist the user in understanding the potential audience reach across multiple assets, assisting with media planning and market analysis 
• Allow publishers to illustrate their exclusive reach within a group/category

The Nett UB Metric for groups will also be made available within the Advanced Demographics Multi-brand report. This will be enabled automatically for all accounts with the release.

SiteCensus Demographics allows the integration of your online survey results to be run against existing SiteCensus reporting channels to give users insight into the profiles of website visitors.

Demographic information collected via the Market Intelligence survey is now stored in the SiteCensus Demographics Database. Once entering the demographics module, each report can be selected to understand the type of audience that has visited the selected channel, allowing for page level internal demographic reporting.

There are two levels of reporting User Profiles and Custom Profiles. The User Profile report shows the breakdown of visitor profiles for a reporting channel, while the Custom Profile reports allow you to build a profile from the online survey responses and run reporting against existing channels to allow for a more targeted understanding of the website audience. 

We are confident that these enhancements will improve your Market Intelligence and SiteCensus user experience and provide you with greater knowledge of your users, competitors and the market place.

 For assistance in using these features, please contact them on the CareZA support email address.

Common practice is that traditional principles of media advertising are applied on the Web, however, new media requires a different approach and analysis. Therefore in this article we will explain some Internet specific metrics such as cookies, unique browsers and why is challenging to use try to transform cookies into people and to use this for online campaign measurement and planning.

Cookies are a very common metric for advertising and are accepted as standard globally. Not because the Audience Measurement company tracks cookies (in fact Audience measurement can also track people, using a Panel) but because the advertising platforms use cookies. Majority of the internet advertising is delivered to internet users by an Ad-Server (a server dedicated to serve advertising). This ad-server uses cookies to recognize users (in order to avoid, for example, that the same user is exposed to the same ad 100 times). Whenever a campaign is planned, it is planned taking into account a frequency metric. Based on that, the frequency is calculated by the ad-servers using cookies, not counting the real number of people.

Cookie facts:

• Cookies can be accepted or not accepted by a user.
• Once accepted, cookies can be deleted or not by a user.
• There is software that helps users manage their cookie acceptance and deletion.
• A cookie is linked to the browser that accepted it.
• If a person uses different browsers (for example Internet Explorer and FireFox) this person will generate multiple cookies (in this case, two).

It’s very easy to understand why the number of  total “unique cookies” is way beyond the total market population: because Unique Browsers (metric based on cookie count) were never intended to be people. This is why in markets where Nielsen provides the common industry currency based on tags & cookies, the total number of Unique Browsers per month is higher than the total internet population or even, in some cases the total population of the country.

Now think about how you use your computer on a daily basis: do you delete cookies? Maybe you do. How often do you delete cookies? Some would say once a month, some once a week, a few will say every day. But let’s pretend you NEVER delete cookies. How many different browsers do you use in a month? Maybe you are a loyal IE user, but sometimes you use Firefox, or you check your webmail using your mobile: you have “generated” 3 different cookies, even without deleting them. So also cookie generation is something that needs to be considered in the Audience Measurement scenario, and it is even more important than the simple cookie deletion factor.

Unfortunately there is no simple way to take into account the cookie deletion and cookie generation factors with a pure tagging only methodology. Even crossing data with a panel is a hard task, considering that cookie deletion and generation vary a lot over time and there is not a “fixed adjustment rate” that can be applied. To achieve this it requires a very specific type of high quality panel, both in terms of sample recruitment and management, and in terms of the technique to track the individuals under measurement. Seasonality, Audience composition and Site type effect a lot the variation of deletion and duplication phenomenon.

Several approaches have been explored with cookies only, or with lower quality panels, however the standard error is too high to be considered solid and reliable, and or on the other site the user privacy can be put at risk because too intrusive methods are chosen. But let’s focus on one small fact: the chances that a user generates or deletes a cookie in a single day are lower than the chances that a user generates or deletes a cookie in a week or a month interval.

Let’s do a very simplified example; User “Mario” is loyal to the site, he surfs on that site every single day (we all wish our users are like Mario, don’t we?). He is also a privacy concerned user, and he deletes his cookies once per day. So if we try to draw a small graph with the real number of people surfing for 5 days and the number of different cookies surfing for the same interval (cumulated data) the result would be similar to this:

The Red line is the real number of people (1) and the blue line is the number of unique cookies (Unique Browser) surfing on the site. So if we abstract from this example and generalize the normal website audiences over time, the graph that we obtain would be something similar to the following:

The way Average Daily Unique Browsers is calculated by Nielsen.

Why 28 rolling days? Because we need to make sure we analyze the same amount of the same day-type. Average Daily Unique Browser metric is the closest metric to the real number of people based on pure tagging methodology.

Why not using information straight from a Panel to transform cookies into people?

Internal research has demonstrated multiple times that although it is possible to transform cookies into people using a Panel, it’s not a simple process, and certainly requires far more than just applying a conversion ratio. The huge variations on behavior of the users over time and across demographic dimensions make hard to create those simple ratios. And this is mainly not due cookie deletion, but due to the cookie generation process.

While it is possible to understand the cookies age, it’s impossible to know if that cookie is “new” because the user just deleted one or because it’s a real new user. Therefore assumptions have to be done based on the real number of people.

Moreover, with tagging methodology only, it’s impossible to know how many people are behind a browser and how many browsers are in front of a single person.

Cookies are good and transparent.

Cookies have many advantages in terms of audience measurement, they are easily understood, there is a massive knowledge about how to use them, and are a shared tool across multiple Internet technical solutions. They are also the most common metric for the ads, Audience measurement, and, with the Average Daily Unique Browser, it’s a transparent metric, providing figures close to the real number of people.

A: The answer is; Frequency differentials - If a site has a high frequency then they will have higher daily UBs but the monthly figure is de duplicated so all those that came back multiple times will be counted only once.

http://www.thedigitaledge.co.za/cambrient2/view/cambrient2/en/page203

Day 3 of the conference got into some of the topics that were of most interest to me personally and the OPA. The big ones were a panel on the state and future of site-centric measurement (ie.web analytics), a panel on audience targeting and then a related panel on the future of ad-serving. The afternoon sessions were skipped as I spent it with the EMEA and Mobile reps from Nielsen over a very long and productive lunch. It was an opportunity to chart the rest of the year for the OPA’s measurement requirements and spend time with the regional and product heads on how I see things.

Quote of the morning for me was that “people do not equal cookies, so don’t treat them like they do”. Couldn’t agree more. We keep trying to come up with a unique visitor definition that gets as close approximation to a person with various approaches to the cookie deletion problem, amongst other issues. Perhaps its better to just understand that a cookie is a cookie, and that it is very likely to be larger than the number of actual people visiting a website.

For South Africa and the OPA, I have the following key insights …

1. We’re only 10+ years in….
We’re so hard on ourselves as an industry, desperate to get this right in a market that’s effectively the wild west of media. All the measurement companies, from been-around-for-ever Nielsen to just-out-the-gates Quantcast, have their own methodology and nuanced approach to audience measurement online. Audience comparison with different tools is and will be tricky for a little while yet as the market evolves toward metrics that are actually going to drive improved returns for media owners and buyers alike. Currently, everyone is losing out due to low CPM values and shoddy CTR’s, so things must and will change. For a small market like ours, we need to focus on the basics: education, education and more education of the buy-side.

1. Listen to the old guys…
In SA, the digital industry is dominated by youngsters. Without being coy, I take my hat off to the guys I met at ICOM who were masters of the traditional audience measurement space in TV and are now participating fully in the digital realm. You feel like these chaps can work out where audiences are with a slide rule, a pencil and many years of proven marketing theory. When they query current hypotheses for the digital world, one realises that the basic questions marketers ask haven’t changed; they just want to reach the right audience for the right price. The problem seems to be that the way we’re currently presenting digital audience data isn’t allowing them to answer these questions easily at all. Until they can, we’re not going to to the big money.

2. It all about the data.
Data is the key asset, interpreting it is the key skill. If you’ve got the data on audience activity and behaviour, you can draw out insights that help you sell. Not rocket science by any stretch, but more needs to happen to make standardised metrics available to more people so they can make marketing decisions without trepidation. The question for media owners and organisations like the OPA is who owns their audience data? It seems that due to the complexity of collecting and validating it, the data is going to from now on sit with 3rd party measurement entities who media owners depend on to unlock the value of their traffic.

3. Brand advertising requires targeting
Its unequivocal for me. For digital to attract the kind of share of spend we want, we have to enable brand advertisers to easily deliver and report on their marketing efforts with comparable metrics of reach to other media (tv, radio etc). There is only one way to make this happen - effective targeting platforms for ads via demographic, behavioural, contextual and other profiling. Watch this space closely, as the measurement companies and ad-serving players begin to dance together. Equally, we need to keep an eye on Privacy, and how our local regulatory enviroment reacts to increased monitoring.

2. Preaching to the converted is easy
This phrase is often said by our very own OPA chairperson Mr Adrian Hewlett, and it rings true here in Lisbon. The I-COM global summit had very few advertisers or agency delegates. The world over, they need to join the conversation actively to help craft a set of audience measurement tools that give them what they want - simple, effective media planning in the digital space.

5. We’ve done well for our market!
While I get questions often about our choice of measurement provider, who the provider is I feel is not the key issue if you take a step back. Our goal must be singularly to drive digital advertising spend for the eco-system to grow. To do that, our primary function is to educate the market, bring agencies and planners into the fold and make it as easy as possible for them to do their work with a strong measurement vendor. The OPA is the strongest digital body in the country, with a strong exco who are making the right decisions to pursue growth. From a measurement perspective, the fact that we have a single currency for measurement data through Nielsen means that our planners have it much easier than any other territory I now know of. We are equally not behind in any way, with cutting edge developments in measuring things like the mobile internet and panel based approaches being brought to our shores as quickly as any where else.

Thanks again to the OPA exco and Isobar for making the trip possible. A brief member report will be sent out after I’ve consulted with the rest of the OPA exco on some key decisions that need to be made ahead of our vendor review later in the year. I hope these daily reports were useful for those that managed to find them!

Josh

I had an early start yesterday. Too early in fact, as I’m completely zonked. My first meeting was at 6.30am for a demo with Quantcast’s Adam Gerber before he flew out. They’re an aggressive, new player with a free service play for media owners which makes revenue off the back of a targeting platform. They also do demographics by inference on activity across their network. I’m unsure about that for our market due to sample size and the fact that inference rules have to consider a market’s cultural oddities - I would guess that they’ve focused on a US/UK model of behaviour. Its really cool to use their free tools though to see what the US market looks like.

The keynotes were fantastic. I did my duty and tweeted through these (http://twitter.com/joshprefix). Thanks for the comments I got from a some followers. Geoff Ramsay (CEO eMarketer) is a dynamic speaker and a strong character. Very excitable and great insights and predictions. The CEO of comScorewas less excitable, but very well considered and gave me a view into just how big a challenge we face within the sector. You can see that their CEO really takes measurement personally. In chats with his staff, apparently he gets dirty with the algorithms they use and is a real data guy at the core. It permeates in the confidence with which comScore talk about their approach. They certainly think they’re onto the right model with their hybrid model of site beaconing combined with a panel. The best way to get into what was talked about is through Twitter on the #icom tag.

The rest of the day was leaders in specific areas giving short presentations followed by panel debates. I won’t get into it all (see the programme for March 11 for the topics/people; http://i-com.org/global-summit-2010-programme/), but I have 3 key take-aways.

1. The click as a metric has been, well, a bit of a disaster. It hold little value for brand advertisers, and people who do click are actually less desirable audiences than those who don’t it would appear from the research. But it was the simplest of all this digital mess to understand, and now it needs to change.
2. Ad-buyers need a way to compare digital simply to the other mediums they spend on (eg. TV). This is the only way for us get a bigger portion of total advertising spend. People are not sure if GRPs are the answer, but they can be used to make media planners split budgets to digital first on a GRP basis, and then plan on the medium.
3. The measurement industry’s greatest contribution to growth of our sector can be to enable brand advertising in the digital realm. The way I now see it, paid search has succeeded because its quite simple to understand. (match keyword to product and pay). If the analytics and ad-serving platforms can get it right over the next few years to allow brand advertisers to reach desired demographics across many digital properties, we’ll bring the brand advertisers online, and fundamentally shift the spend allocations going forward. Cool huh!?

I had many side-line meetings throughout the day, and have demo’s now from most the measurement vendors. Dinner was at a big casino and I got to sit next to Henry Stevens, Director of Media & Entertainment at GSMA. We had a ripper of a chat about mobile and emerging markets. I learnt a lot from him about the move to get operators more involved in the media side of the mobile business, and how the GSMA is driving that.

Day 3 begins. Will report back tomorrow….

Josh

Next of interest was Brandwatch, who monitor social media. Seems they’re the leader in the space locally dominated by Quirk’s Brandseye. This area of audience measurement is gaining importance, and these guys seem to have built a content query and reporting approach that can actually give a customer a monetary value for ROI if they react to social media messages about their brand. Not my thing, but understand how its part of the mix.

The pure measurement companies that I saw were all interesting and different in approach. A new player called Alenty showed amazing tech using AJAX to monitor much more of what is actually viewed on a page (rather than what is assumed to be viewed because the page loaded). Really impressive stuff. Effective Measure seem to have become a major emerging market force. They focused on their market insights rather than their solution, which was very relevant to us in SA. They focus on Asia and the Middle East, and have similar trends in mobile phone use to deal with. During the smoke break, I landed up being invited out for dinner with their CEO.

Two of the strongest presentations I saw were from Eyeblaster and Visible Measures. Both are thinking differently about the space, and I think they’re onto something. Visible Measures believe intently that video is the medium that will bring brand advertising spend into the digital realm - I hope so, it has eluded us all thus far! Eyeblaster had a brilliant show that took us through just how complicated the world of advertising production and placement has become in a digital, real-time world. In essence, digital marketing is too complex, and it is the major inhibitor to increasing spend.

I had to miss the rest of the presentations due to the round table, but have setup private meetings with all the key measurement vendors over the next 2 days to ensure I get a clear picture of the current landscape.

The content of the round table discussion cannot be made public at this stage, but a statement may be released by ICOM later in the week. What I can say is that we have a good set of experiences to share as a case study, and that we can learn a lot from our peers in other markets if we want to get the basics right and avoid many mistakes that have been made by others. I plan to actively engage with more organisations globally in the year ahead.

I’ve just returned from dinner with the guys from Effective Measure and a few others. Got to see a bit of Lisbon which was a plus. I sadly missed presentations from Google, ComScore, Nielsen and Quantcast due to the round-table. Tomorrow is another day though, and I’ll be sure to catch up.

I introduced myself to a few people and headed into the Ibero-American Summit programme. I’d been given an special invite to this stream of the conference which seeks to give weight to the Latin American industry who are looking at regional solutions. I had hoped to learn some lessons, but this stream wasn’t to be of too much interest to me, and I headed off to join the Knowledge Centre presentations for the rest of the day. The Knowledge Centre was a brilliant series of short presentations from leading vendors on the latest trends. The right place for me to be as far as the OPA is concerned, as it provided a snapshot of the major players and key trends.