“Your readers raise valid questions on the surface (and they actually match a false conclusion drawn by another industry writer who failed to allow us to comment). I’d like to clarify our solution “View Through”; they are all in the same ballpark, but pCPM and induced visits are on the “field level”, while everything else I’ve seen is in the “upper deck”. Which is why we are pretty confident in our patent-pend. Everyone’s trying to quantify the same thing – which is true online advertising effectiveness and influence. The various metrics and tracking methods have the same goal. Ours is done right (we believe) and differs in execution.

To make our solution clearer, I want to point to a few pieces for reference before I get to pCPM & Induced Visits: first, http://www.doubleclick.com/insight/pdfs/dc_cont.... This white paper, meant to show via a Case Study how view-through is beneficial to an advertiser, fails in a few ways: 1) there’s no proper explanation of what the “control” was; 2) all the data is expressed in percentages so we the reader can’t be sure there’s any statistical significance; 3) without these key elements, we can’t know the exact results of the “View Through” model – its sort of a Black Box. Further, from what I’ve read (both this white paper and other literature on the topic), the biggest issue is that it is only a test of the concept, nothing at all like a packaged metric that advertisers can plug in and actually derive value from. In fact, this View Through model could never be an accurately packaged metric since it seems to require an advertiser wasting half their budget on control ads which don’t actually do anything beneficial to an advertiser. Our solution requires no A/B testing or further investment, it “plugs in”.

The second piece I’d like to point your attention to, which is much “meatier”, is: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625449. This article is very solid in that it approves the goal of statistically-measured visits (our same goal), but trashes the implementation. Two-thirds of this piece is about how “view-through” is measured, why it can overstate visits, and details a bunch of processes advertisers would have to take to actually implement it and make it work. One could conclude from this that basically “view-through” counts ALL visits following ANY ad-views, which can obviously get totally out of control when you have lots of ads being shown and lots of people likely to visit just by chance, or through accidental clicks, parallel SEO efforts, etc. As a final test, since this concept was introduced years ago, how many people do you know who use “View Through”?

These are problems we feel we solve. The author above points out that “View-Through” measures all the visits after ad views. But “induced visits”, what pCPM is based on, are different; the deep technical problem isn’t discovering if someone saw the ad and then visited the site; that’s easy. The problem is removing the baseline level of site-visits which would have happened anyway, from a variety of other sources and inputs, and measuring that difference in a way that is statistically soundproof. And we’ve solved it in a way so straightforward and robust that it can be automated as a metric, not just paraded out in whitepapers on special occasions, and usable by an advertiser – again, complementary (yet more comprehensively) to CPA, CPC, CPM or however an advertiser traditionally measures their campaigns, without any further spending or A/B “testing”.”

“Your readers raise valid questions on the surface (and they actually match a false conclusion drawn by another industry writer who failed to allow us to comment). I’d like to clarify our solution “View Through”; they are all in the same ballpark, but pCPM and induced visits are on the “field level”, while everything else I’ve seen is in the “upper deck”. Which is why we are pretty confident in our patent-pend. Everyone’s trying to quantify the same thing – which is true online advertising effectiveness and influence. The various metrics and tracking methods have the same goal. Ours is done right (we believe) and differs in execution.

To make our solution clearer, I want to point to a few pieces for reference before I get to pCPM & Induced Visits: first, http://www.doubleclick.com/insight/pdfs/dc_cont.... This white paper, meant to show via a Case Study how view-through is beneficial to an advertiser, fails in a few ways: 1) there’s no proper explanation of what the “control” was; 2) all the data is expressed in percentages so we the reader can’t be sure there’s any statistical significance; 3) without these key elements, we can’t know the exact results of the “View Through” model – its sort of a Black Box. Further, from what I’ve read (both this white paper and other literature on the topic), the biggest issue is that it is only a test of the concept, nothing at all like a packaged metric that advertisers can plug in and actually derive value from. In fact, this View Through model could never be an accurately packaged metric since it seems to require an advertiser wasting half their budget on control ads which don’t actually do anything beneficial to an advertiser. Our solution requires no A/B testing or further investment, it “plugs in”.

The second piece I’d like to point your attention to, which is much “meatier”, is: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625449. This article is very solid in that it approves the goal of statistically-measured visits (our same goal), but trashes the implementation. Two-thirds of this piece is about how “view-through” is measured, why it can overstate visits, and details a bunch of processes advertisers would have to take to actually implement it and make it work. One could conclude from this that basically “view-through” counts ALL visits following ANY ad-views, which can obviously get totally out of control when you have lots of ads being shown and lots of people likely to visit just by chance, or through accidental clicks, parallel SEO efforts, etc. As a final test, since this concept was introduced years ago, how many people do you know who use “View Through”?

These are problems we feel we solve. The author above points out that “View-Through” measures all the visits after ad views. But “induced visits”, what pCPM is based on, are different; the deep technical problem isn’t discovering if someone saw the ad and then visited the site; that’s easy. The problem is removing the baseline level of site-visits which would have happened anyway, from a variety of other sources and inputs, and measuring that difference in a way that is statistically soundproof. And we’ve solved it in a way so straightforward and robust that it can be automated as a metric, not just paraded out in whitepapers on special occasions, and usable by an advertiser – again, complementary (yet more comprehensively) to CPA, CPC, CPM or however an advertiser traditionally measures their campaigns, without any further spending or A/B “testing”.”

This is something they should clarify.