Simon Canning | July 24, 2008
WEBSITE operators are bringing online audience measurement figures into disrepute by using tricks to boost traffic numbers in the eyes of advertisers, at a time when the industry is trying to clean up its image.
As online content has grown to become part of the media mainstream, operators have been battling to find ways to boost the raw data used by less sophisticated advertisers to measure traffic.
Industry experts say that one of the most popular methods of boosting click counts is stretching news stories across multiple pages, rather than presenting the story as a single page. The method was developed in the era of dial-up internet as a way to reduce page download times when website visitors were restricted by the capabilities of 56K modems.
But the practice remains a common one in the era of broadband, with publishers such as Fairfax Digital still spreading even short stories across several pages.
Patty Keegan, from the Internet Advertising Bureau, says the increasing sophistication of the technology makes such tricks more difficult to get away with, but they still exist. "There are things like news sites that rotate new ads in as news is updated," Keegan says.
"Perhaps the most nefarious thing I saw was in another country where two newspapers were competing evenly for the same market.
"Overnight one of the newspapers suddenly doubled its page impressions, and it turned out they had split their national news page into two pages."
Online advertising experts have remained largely tight-lipped about some of the tricks of the trade.
The IAB is undertaking a concerted review with the aim of developing a new, more accurate audience measurement system.
Meanwhile, key buyers of online advertising privately admit to disregarding many of the numbers websites claim.
"They are just not believable," one online ad agency founder says.
"I have spoken to a number of media buyers out there and they say the same thing."
Another element that many websites offered has been pop-up advertising, which helped increase impression numbers. The value of such ads to website operators, both in terms of revenue and data, has plummeted with the widespread adoption of pop-up blocking software.
Sandra Hanchard, an analyst with online monitoring company Hitwise, says the adoption of tricks to drive traffic is being countered by companies seeking to offer best practice to advertisers.
"The first trend we're seeing is an increasing use of pay-per-click search marketing by publishers to drive website traffic on news items," Hanchard says.
"This is important because search engines account for more than one in five visits to news and media print websites."
More important, she sees news publishers utilising social networking sites as a growing tool for boosting traffic.
"News and media print websites are receiving more traffic from Web 2.0 properties," she says.
"Social networking websites increased their referrals to news and media print websites by 148.6 per cent, comparing May 2007 to May 2008."
With search such a vital part of the online advertising engine, news operators are also battling to pick up on the news keywords of the day as they try to get their sites to appear at the top of search results from engines such as Google and Yahoo.
Simon Van Wyck, founder of web advertising company Hothouse, says a number of web publishers and portals count visitors to allied sites, but do not necessarily have the right to claim such traffic.
"I think you can look at other things, such as claiming traffic that is not theirs," Van Wyck says.
Examples include Ninemsn, which claims Hotmail and Yahoo.
Recently the Internet Advertising Bureau began looking at the issue of automatic refreshes of pages -- a common element used by news publishers to keep late-breaking stories at the top of lists.
Keegan says the problem occurs when ads are refreshed along with the stories, creating the impression of more traffic.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24068103-26077,00.html (Published by The Australian)
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