Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 4 – Advertising

Introduction

Advertising plays a major role in all marketing, and has become an indispensable tool in revenue generation and site promotion on the Web. In traditional media, advertisements are measured and analyzed with estimates – impressions, reach, and other quantities are guessed from samples. Newspapers and magazines do not really know how many readers they have; only how many copies they printed. Radio and television stations can only guess at the number of viewers at any given time.

Figure 1. The Advertising Report shows the number of impressions each ad had.

On the Web, we have log files and a system that tracks every hit and click, so we can know almost exactly how many impressions an advertisements has (we cannot know how many people are sitting in front of a computer and other factors, discussed in Appendix B - Technical Details of Metric Accuracy lead to less accuracy of this data). We can estimate other quantities, such as reach, more accurately, because our data is virtually complete. Figure 1 is an example of Summary’s Advertising Report. In the Advertising Report, each Hit is a single request for the given advertisement. This is the same thing as an impression in traditional marketing. So using the Advertising Report, you can see that /ads/campaign1.html had 15,385 hits or impressions.