When is a click not a click? – September 4, 2006
Devin Leonard at Fortune writes a good piece on the lack of audited metrics in interactive advertising. See my earlier post on Forbes.com getting grief from the NYT last week. Again, to restate my opinion, the issue is not whether or not the IAB or the third-party ad servers, or the ad networks can come to agreement on what constitutes a valid click or unique, but what the buyers determine is qualified leads and conversions. The onus on measurement is on the buyer, not the seller. The buyers have the only perfect clarity on bottom line actions and will “train” the market accordingly. I spend my day in front of dashboards that no one but me and my team have insight into and those dashboards, in the end, are what the ads are being measured against.
“Although the Internet may be the most measurable of advertising media, advertisers and Web sites are actually having huge battles because they can’t agree on what they should be counting.”