Calculating clicks

Entrepreneur, Feb, 2002 by Nichole L. Torres

If you sell ad space on your Web site, take heed--new guidelines for counting the number of times an ad is viewed online were recently released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in New York City.

These guidelines are meant to end count discrepancies between Web publishers and advertisers, a move that could reportedly affect hundreds of millions of dollars in online ad revenues. According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study commissioned by the IAB, revenues for the online ad revenue industry are estimated at nearly $8.2 billion.

The voluntary standards are meant to streamline the counting process by outlining standards everyone can follow. They stem from the fact that methods employed by advertisers and Web publishers to measure "click-throughs" (the number of times users click on an ad) are not universal and can lead to contradictory results.

For the latest guidelines and measurement tools, check out the IAB Web site at www.iab.net. The site also offers tools, such as a glossary of interactive advertising terms, guidelines for rich media ad formats, and a master list of spiders and robots (programs to collect Web page data).