BPA Worldwide has partnered with Nielsen Online to enhance its auditing of Web site traffic for business to business publishers.
The association will now offer site traffic measurement nearly in real time. Volunteers and BPA members already participating in BPA’s log file-based interactive audits will be able to use the service in beta starting this month. It will then be rolled out to all BPA members in January of 2009.
The new audits, which allow users to gauge page impressions, unique browsers, users sessions, unique browser frequency, user session duration and page duration, will be delivered as a bundled service with all print and event audits, at no extra cost.
“The media companies that we deal with now don’t think of themselves strictly as publishers anymore because they have so many different media platforms and sell advertisements across all those, often as a package,” explained Pete Black, SVP of busines development for BPA. “BPA needs to be in a position where it can offer an audit of all audiences that are part of those platforms, so this is pretty much in keeping pace with what publishers are doing these days.”
Data from these new audits will be available to BPA members 24 hours a day and selectable by market sector, audience’s country of origin and specific site. BPA and Nielsen will also work together to collect qualitative survey data from site users; these data, which allow publishers and advertisers to judge the quality of an audience, will be added to the new audit reports in a few months.
“So much of today’s discussion in the ad world is about audience and not about the number of magazines distributed or the number of pages on a Web site,” Black continued. “It’s much more than that and much broader, and certainly media companies want to be able to say that they reach their audiences in a number of different ways, whether in print or online or face-to-face.”
Black said Nielsen was chosen from a pool of a dozen potential partners, partly because the Nielsen system could be easily adopted by BPA at low cost, and partly because Nielsen, like BPA, has global name recognition.
One of BPA’s major goals in this endeavor is to establish a standard that measures all sites the same way, to promote fair competition among publisher sites.
