This is a guest-post from Olesya Zinovieva, you can follow her on Twitter at @olesya_zinovief
Main advantage of Online Advertising before traditional media is its ability to measure the users’ response and provide transparent reports for both advertisers and publishers. Having technology as the strongest benefit of online media ad networks often fails to deliver accurate reports due to discrepancy issues in ad measuring and tracking.
To solve this problem in 2003 a global consortium of leading bodies within the advertising agency, advertiser, media and research disciplines started the process of development of both the US and Global Guidelines. 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 IAB, other industry groups like AAAA, the ANA, the ARF, MRC, and others have all played an integral role in creation, adoption and further implementation of these Guidelines, which are constantly being updated along the technology progress and online media growth.
“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.” (http://www.iab.net).
With the growth of number of ad networks today it has become a necessity be certified compliant with the guidelines in serving and measuring ads. Other essential requirements may also include disaster recovery system, behavioral/activity-based filtering and the reporting of the time at which data is considered final, as well as publisher support system. Standardizing ad serving and ad tracking systems indeed makes it easier for advertisers, agencies and publishers to provide transparency to 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.
Which ad-networks 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, Microsoft, Turner Digital Media Technologies, Walt Disney Internet Group, Yahoo!, OpenX x, etc.
How about Asian Ad-Networks?
Being one of the biggest ad networks in Asia, Innity is preparing for the BPA Worldwide ad server system certification. BPA Worldwide’s ad serving system complies with all Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) guidelines and provides additional systems verification that goes above and beyond the IAB requirements.
Most of ad-networks mentioned above operate worldwide but they do not fully cover Asia, which actually comprises the biggest Internet population of the world and yet has a huge potential as at present it includes only 18.5% of the total Asia population. According to Internet World Stats out of 6.8 billion world population 1.7 billion are already Internet users, which indicates 362.3 % growth from 2000 to 2009.
At the same time out of 3.8 billion of ASIA population 704.2 million people are already Internet users and it shows 516.1 % Internet usage growth over the same period. Though 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.
The Asian growth is huge, and explains why Google is so keen to upstage Baidu in China. The transparency issue is better, but as anybody who has played with AdWords will know, it is far from 100%….
Hey Ades,
Thanks for the information pal. I have heard about the IAB guidelines but wasn’t sure about the ad-networks that are compliant with the IAB guidelines.
Transparency in advertising is always demanding and always followed by almost by almost ad networks, but the fact to be mentioned here is that there are some cheat codes these advt networks draft to escape the standard guidelines, which is not a good practice.
Thanks for such worthy post it has lot knowledge about the measurement and tracking of advertisements.
Hey Ades,
It looks like Asian market is growing at a faster pace than the rest of the world.
I guess, the accuracy would provide us more & more opportunities for success & profits.
We’ve just had a real issue with affiliates on an Asian network, a very high incidence of unsatisfactory completions.
Like 99% or more are advertising to the United States and similar markets.
wow there must be some very un touched places out there.
I know exactly what PS3 is talking about – lots of fraudulent activity in the asian networks and affiliates are pulling out.
@”Get 3 Quotes | 3Q” – I would say that adwords/adsense is far from beeing close even to half the transparency it should have.
wow, why is the problem focused in asia.
Fancy seeing you here! I am sure the problem is not just limited to that particular region, it is just exsaserbated (?spelling) there.
Speaking of ad networks, what about AdBrite? I tried them out once and don’t think I ever made the first dime.
still not think my blog enough with innity. Just fine with nuffnang and advertlets.
too many ad network. I also don’t know which one i should try. ALl of them? hoho..
@titan It surely depends on the products you are promoting, rankings, traffic etc. What is your goal?
Hello, I’m promoting software….can u tell me what ad network should I try? thx in advance!
@livingroomfurniture Because the most people live in Asia and their lies the greatest potential.
-Jack
I heard this from many blogs and it’s quite saddening. Why is the problem focused in Asia? or is it only on Asia?
So if you heard it on lots of blogs already, haven’t you learned the answer to your repetitive question yet?
Chris Peterson @ hmm. quite right buddy.
Hey Ades,
I agree that a transparency is needed to regulate the organic advertising over internet. If this regulation is removed than the internet will become a spam place in no time, where many people will loose their money everyday in such scams, in short that will be a ugly picture.
IAB guidelines will tighten up the loosened online advertising a bit.
i guess, its time to choose which one i love and i can promote.
Hi, Asia is a hot market to break into and I last read that WordPress.com blogs are banned in China. There are many obstacles to overcome but in due time, I’m hopeful that the rules will iron out. Very informative article your guest writer posted!
thanks for sharing this valuable information. It is very important that ad agencies can prove that they are receiving or not receiving the impressions or leads that they claim.
ehm..not many people have chance to make money with many ad network. So, just choose one and focus with that program.
This is the first I have heard of IAB guidelines. Thanks for the educational post.
It is very sad to not see kontera, amazon affiliates in the list. I can certainly say that these networks are not used by thousands of publishers, but they are used by reasonable number of users. I believe Kontera shows impressions with 24 hours delay. This has raised lot of concerns before. But still they manage to survive.
If kontera and other ad networks does not follow IAB guidelines publishers must rethink of using them.