A Uniform Standard for Web Measurement

Regardless of whether you are buying apples, sugar, furniture for children's room or advertising space in the Internet, there are two crucial preconditions for your success: measurability and comparability of different choices.

You will select apples by comparing them to other apples, with their weight expressed in kilograms; the same applies to sugar, whether white or brown. If you are trying to furnish the most cheerful room in your home, you will need a wardrobe and a bed with precisely defined dimensions.

What about online advertising? If you have decided to make the best use of your advertising budget, what is the first piece of information that you will ask the website owner to provide you? Probably the data on the number of the website's visitors. Before making any plans, it is important to acquire comprehensive information on the advertising potential of the media outlet you intend to use to convey your advertising message.

Purchase of space in any media (including the online media) should be based on the fundamental axiom of trade: the buyer should know in advance what exactly he or she will get for the money spent, and should be able to choose the best offer among those offered by several different vendors. Also, the information about various available choices should be uniform and patterned on an accepted industry standard.

For this reason, independent auditors were introduced globally in the area of measurement of media outlets' advertising potential, beginning in 1914 when the first ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulations) was established in the USA. The ABC was an association of publishers, advertisers and agencies for sale of media space. In the decades that followed, ABC has spread around the world (ABC Serbia was formed in 2006), auditing the circulation of print media in accordance with the globally accepted standard.

Due to the rising popularity of the Internet, it became necessary to introduce a new standard for monitoring of traffic of the increasing number of websites, a task that was undertaken by the International Federation of Audit Bureaus of Circulation, established in 1996. By the end of February 2010, with support from USAID and IREX, the Serbian branch of ABC (www.abcsrbija.com) has launched a new system of website auditing.

The system works similarly to the Google Analytics tool, with several important advantages. The monitored website's pages include a script that sends information on the number of visitors to ABC servers. This data is then archived, analyzed and presented in a web application that is available 24 hours a day on the ABC Serbia's website.

This approach allows us to stop using various tools for web analytics and comparison (which, unavoidably, give more or less different results – Google Analytics, Site Catalyst, Stat Counter, Alexa...), introducing a uniform and globally relevant standard.

An important feature of the new web auditing system (which is also one of its crucial advantages compared to Google Analytics) is the possibility to allow all members of the ABC access to data on the number of visitors of all websites in the system. At the same time, owners of the websites can access more than 90 parameters, while significantly smaller number of basic parameters (15) is available to everyone else – those related to planning and purchase of online space in the media.

Introduction of the independent verification and standardized presentation of the website traffic in Serbia will contribute to increased level of trust between the advertisers and media owners and allow the inflow of larger amounts of money into the domestic Internet. Since the online advertising is currently largely underdeveloped (it accounts for only 2% of total advertising expenses, which is way below global standards – for example, online advertising in Great Britain amounts to 23.5% of the budget, which is more than the the TV share), it is not surprising that the launch of this system was hailed as a positive development by the online business community, which now has reasons to look forward to a brighter future.

Milan Kovacevic

MC Newsletter,
March 12, 2010