Proving a return is crucial to advertisers and Nielsen is hoping its’ new tool called Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, for advertisers and media firms helps improve accuracy in measurement.

Television ratings has along been the measuring stick for over half a century and now it’s coming to the web. It’s the reason why Law & Order was cancelled by NBC. Advertisers depend heavily on television ratings to make the right investment.

In this digital world, head count is crucial. Television isn’t the same as the 1980s. Networks such as CBS have already expanded to multi-platform campaigns to reflect the landscape.

Not to be left behind, the Nielesen company is offering advertiser and web publishers a new measurement metrics to track how well a cross platform campaign is doing.

Clicks and impressions are not big favorites of advertisers and agencies when it comes to measuring effectiveness.

Powered by anonymous data and gender buckets reports the Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings will use reach, frequency, and Gross Rating Point (GRP) to measure the return of online advertising campaigns.

Basically, it is tv style rating for online venues such as Facebook and Yahoo.!

Here’s how it works. At the request of an advertiser, Nielsen requestests a pixel to find out how often a  display or video advertisement is displayed in a browser. If a user goes to a Nielsen partner such as Facebook and then visits another Web site where an ad that Nielsen is tracking is shown, Nielsen will put a pixel in the ad that will prompt Facebook to send Nielsen the age and gender of the user who viewed the ad.

Nielsen insists that the data will be viewed in the aggregate and not on an individual basis. According to Nielsen, third parties will not know what site the user came from or the identity of the advertiser.

Privacy is a touch subject. The Nielsen company has addressed privacy concerns saying users can opt out of participating and have vowed to not pass along any user information, nor will users be tracked from one site to another.

The online realm has sold its’ self as a different type of medium than is consumed differently. So while marketers applaud the announcement, it is to be seen whether using tv measurements of reach, frequency, and  (GRP) model will work well for the Internet.

The product will begin testing in the United States in the fourth quarter and will be available for commercial use in 2011.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 30th, 2010 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Featured, New Media, broadcast media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.