Earlier today we tweeted this Prezi presentation on alternatives to PowerPoint/Keynote for researchers that Tim Macer gave at a recent ASC conference.

It proved a popular link, so we thought we’d turn the presentation into an audio slideshow (just to see how well it would come out). The result is above, it’s only 5mins long so enjoy! A larger version is available on our YouTube page. Or you can revert to the original Prezi version.

As a measurement company it has sometimes been difficult to engage publishers, advertisers or agencies on measuring ad opportunities and user engagement online beyond the page view. However, the increasing take-up of streamed content and Web 2.0 technologies has certainly changed things in this regard.

READ ON…A page view, in simple terms, reflects an html or text page download in response to a user request. Consequently, it’s always had shortcomings when reflecting user engagement and ad opportunities in areas like web applications, online games and streaming video or audio – where content is refreshed without downloading a new html/text page. The increasing use of AJAX programming, which improves web page usability by avoiding the need to reload an entire web page following a user request, similarly erodes the relevance of the traditional page view. This has resulted in a type of perverse situation, where publishers might be reluctant to improve the user experience of their site, as it could be detrimental to their ability to maximise ad sales on it.

It’s important to remember, however, that the page view still measures active engagement on the majority of sites so it will remain a relevant metric for a while. Our goal is to work with the industry on developing a next generation ‘page view’ that is relevant to the whole online experience today. One that supports, for example, partial page refreshes (AJAX), pre-loaded pages (Flash) and streaming. However, what are advertisers and publishers to rely on in the meantime?

Popularity, of course, is a benchmark that tends to stand the test of time but one that doesn’t give the advertiser a sense of how visitors interact with a site. Engagement, if it is possible to truly measure such a thing, can be indicated online by a variety of metrics – not just the number of pages a visitor views but the amount of times they visit a site or how long they spend there.

Of course, all these metrics can paint a wildly different picture of where might be best to advertise. Pages viewed per person tend to show social networking sites as the best bet, whereas the portals – with their variety of offerings – come out well when looking at sessions per person. Conversely, the online games sector tends to perform most strongly in terms of time per person.

Naturally, the best way today to see how sites compare in terms of the potential ad opportunity is to take an overview of all three metrics together to come up with a type of ‘Engagement Ranking’ if you will. For example, take the 500 most popular brands online and see how they rank in each of sessions, time and pages per visitor and then take an average of these three ranks. One would then come out with an ‘Engagement Ranking’ table led by Facebook, eBay and Bebo.

In the short term, and for simplicity’s sake, time spent is probably the best indicator of user engagement today and as a proxy for ad inventory, as it covers all web environments and provides an accurate trend in a pre- and post- Web 2.0 world. However, even time needs to be analysed with care, as longer doesn’t always mean better. Companies involved in search, such as Google and Cheapflights, are likely to be much happier with lower time figures per visit than other sectors. The simple reason is that their business model depends on helping people find what they’re looking for as quickly and efficiently as possible. What is certain, however, is that making sense of the ad opportunity today requires far more thought and research than yesterday!

Alex Burmaster

Guest posts are open to anyone with a passionate, authoritative and authentic take on a big issue. Email us if you would like to begin a new conversation
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