Advertisers and publishers can feel more confident about the data provided by ad networks with third-party certification. Here's why.
The main advantage of online advertising before traditional media is its ability to measure user response and provide transparent reports for both advertisers and publishers. However, even that technology often fails to deliver accurate reports due to discrepancies in ad measuring and tracking.
To solve this problem, in 2003 a global consortium of leading bodies within the ad agency, advertiser, media and research disciplines, started the process of developing US and global guidelines for the industry. These guidelines were created to address long-standing marketer and agency concerns about the need for a standardized method of measuring interactive advertising and a certification of those counts. Headed by the IAB, other industry groups like the AAAA, ANA, ARF, MRC, and others, have all played an integral role in creation, adoption and further implementation of these guidelines, which are constantly being updated with technology's progress and online media growth.
According to the IAB: "All of the guidelines offer a detailed definition for counting an online ad impression, the primary currency of the interactive medium, which is a critical component in establishing consistent and accurate online advertising measurements across publishers and ad serving technologies in the US and around the world. The guidelines address long-standing marketer and agency concerns about the need for a standardized method of measuring interactive advertising. By simplifying the buying and selling process for advertisers, marketers and publishers, these guidelines are intended to hasten the growth of internet advertising spending."
With the growth of number of ad networks today it has become a necessity be certified compliant with these guidelines in serving and measuring ads. Other essential requirements may also include a disaster recovery system, behavioral/activity-based filtering and the reporting of the time at which data is considered final, as well as a publisher support system. Standardizing ad serving and ad tracking systems indeed make it easier for advertisers, agencies and publishers to provide transparency about the performance of their campaigns, which in its turn hastens their selling process as well as the growth of internet advertising spending as a whole.
So what are the ad networks that are compliant with IAB guidelines?
Here are some of them: 24/7 Real Media, AOL, Atlas Media Console, Burst Media's AdConductor, CNET Networks, DoubleClick, Eyeblaster, Forbes.com, Google, Mediaplex (a ValueClick company), Microsoft, Turner Digital Media Technologies, Walt Disney Internet Group, Yahoo!, OpenX x, etc.
And although most of them work worldwide, they do not fully cover Asia, which actually comprises the biggest internet population of the world and yet has a huge potential as it at present includes only 18.5 percent of the total population in Asia. According to Internet World Stats, out of the 6.8 billion world population, 1.7 billion are already internet users, which indicates a 362.3 percent growth from 2000 to 2009. At the same time, out of the 3.8 billion people in Asia, 704.2 million people are already internet users and it shows a 516.1 percent internet usage growth over the same period.
Though the number of ad networks in Asia is still much lower than in the US or Europe, it is growing rapidly and there is a strong demand for accuracy and transparency of ad serving and counting mechanisms. Besides promoting credibility of the ad serving and tracking system within the market, third party certification also gives a greater confidence to advertiser and publisher clients in the reporting data provided by ad networks.
Olesya Zinovieva is a digital media specialist with Innity.