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Advertising companies will no longer need to be concerned about the reliability of audience figures provided by website operators as the industry is about to adopt a set of agreed auditing standards to clear up the 'audience figures' confusion.

The standards have been formulated according to the auditing criteria already used by ABC ELECTRONIC (ABCe) whose parent organisation is the not-for-profit, industry-owned Audit Bureau of Circulation.

Getting ABCe certification will hopefully be tantamount to being given a clean bill of health. This is because the audience figures that a website publishes under the new rules will be based on a set of simple, globally agreed definitions, such as 'page impression', 'user' and 'visit'. As an example, the former is described as 'a file or a combination of files sent to a user as a result of that user's request being received by the server. In effect, one request by a valid user should result in one page impression being claimed.

This may sound like pretty basic stuff, but website related definitions like hits, user numbers, page impressions and click-throughs have been open to considerable interpretation and have caused a lot of rancour between content providers and advertisers, with the latter often being left with much less than they bargained for.

Interactive entertainment portal e-district.net's chief executive was dismissed a few months back following allegations that he had been exaggerating user numbers, while OneView.net's merger with Freecom.net ran into trouble over the same issue.
Just recently, Marcus Leaver, chief executive of media giant Chrysalis, wrote a terse letter to 550 websites with an unequivocal message. He ordered websites to 'publish a recognised industry audit by 1 September - and at least quarterly thereafter - or be named as a company that is not prepared to help this platform mature. Stop trading on non-existent, out-of-date or made-up traffic figures'.

The new standard is likely to result in a lot more sites carrying ABCe or equivalent accreditation. At present, the ABCe has given auditory approval to the audience figures publicised by more than 140 sites in the UK and Ireland, while the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising have both agreed to endorse ABCe's auditing approach.

Media websites looking for more information about how to get an audit, and advertisers keen on finding out which websites now employ the new standards, should log onto www.abce.org.uk or contact the organisation by e-mail at: info@abce.org.uk.

With thanks to Lloyds TSB Success4Business. For more news and information visit www.success4business.com .

(15/6/01)