The audit is a process for verification of the numbers that you report to your advertisers. Audits can be performed in a number of different ways.
* Server-based audits examine data that is available at the server, most importantly traffic logs and web logs. An auditing organization will prowl through the logs to check for various kinds of impressions that should not be reported. This investigation will include an examination of the parameters you use to run your traffic analysis programs. Auditors may insert software in the web server that causes independent logs, totally under the auditor's control, to be created.
* Panel-based audits measure the surfing behavior of a sample panel of users, and attempt to project that statistically to the entire Web population
* Browser-based audits attempt to confirm actual ad displays. For example, an applet can be attached to an ad or to a page; the applet will report when the ad is actually displayed on some user's browser.
Larger consumer sites like Yahoo and Amazon.com, and their advertisers, use panel-based audits, and the numbers are sometimes front-page news. Smaller consumer sites and B2B sites generally don't have the volume for panel-based audits to be statistically significant, and rely mostly on server-based audits. Browser-based audits are a newer technique and are not heavily used.
How good are the different techniques? Jim Spaeth, President of the Advertising Research Foundation, tells of comparisons where on site X a server-based procedure showed 15% of the traffic shown by a panel-based audit, but on a second site Y the order of the methods was reversed, with the server-based procedure showing 300% of the traffic that the panel-based audit did. "This kind of result gives people chills down the back of the neck," Mr. Spaeth said. He also noted that different procedures of the same class also tend to produce different numbers.
* Server-based audits examine data that is available at the server, most importantly traffic logs and web logs. An auditing organization will prowl through the logs to check for various kinds of impressions that should not be reported. This investigation will include an examination of the parameters you use to run your traffic analysis programs. Auditors may insert software in the web server that causes independent logs, totally under the auditor's control, to be created.
* Panel-based audits measure the surfing behavior of a sample panel of users, and attempt to project that statistically to the entire Web population
* Browser-based audits attempt to confirm actual ad displays. For example, an applet can be attached to an ad or to a page; the applet will report when the ad is actually displayed on some user's browser.
Larger consumer sites like Yahoo and Amazon.com, and their advertisers, use panel-based audits, and the numbers are sometimes front-page news. Smaller consumer sites and B2B sites generally don't have the volume for panel-based audits to be statistically significant, and rely mostly on server-based audits. Browser-based audits are a newer technique and are not heavily used.
How good are the different techniques? Jim Spaeth, President of the Advertising Research Foundation, tells of comparisons where on site X a server-based procedure showed 15% of the traffic shown by a panel-based audit, but on a second site Y the order of the methods was reversed, with the server-based procedure showing 300% of the traffic that the panel-based audit did. "This kind of result gives people chills down the back of the neck," Mr. Spaeth said. He also noted that different procedures of the same class also tend to produce different numbers.
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