Ads Impact
Measuring the Impact of Online Advertising
The actual impact of advertising is hard to track and quantify for
both mass media and the Internet, although interactive technology presents
new possibilities for the entire advertising industry. In the case of
mass media, there are companies that measure the size of the audience
per commercial message, for instance Nielson TV and radio ratings, and
efforts are underway to further evaluate the economic impacts of advertising
by correlating advertising and an increase in sales. But broadcast advertising
is fundamentally inefficient because of its redundancy. It sends messages
regardless of whether people are interested, receptive, or relevant
to the product. In comparison, selecting an audience and verifying the
number of people who received a message is relatively easy on the Internet.
However, the advertiser still does not know whether the receiver actually
read the message or not. Refined measures and methods are being proposed
for the Internet. Proctor & Gamble, for example, limits payment for
its ads on the
Yahoo! search engine to the number of people who actually request more
information by clicking on their advertisement rather than paying based
on the number of Yahoo! customers to whom its advertisement is presented
on their search pages. This is in contrast with the traditional method
of measuring viewer-ship, and payment—based on "eyeballs," equivalent
to the number of connections to Yahoo!. As more and more sellers begin
to doubt the effectiveness of broadcast advertising on the Internet
that simply flashes banner advertisements, have to rely on different
revenue sources. As a result, there will be reduced outlets for broadcast-based
advertising in the future. An alternative is targeted advertising.