Profiling the Internet and Online Advertising

Millions of users view billions of pages and trillions of ads, everyday. Here is the process.

Term	Data	Metric Issues
Users	One billion - of 6 billion global population US 164.6m active of 220m	High growth in China and India Shared device at home Cookie deletion inflates unique user metrics Non-additive across domains
Devices	PC's to laptops to phones and gadgets	Multiple devices per user complicate tracking
Visits / Sessions	Neilsen says 11 per week	End of session definitions vary
Domains	Websites visited Neilsen says 27 per week; 105 per month	Changing domain ownerships and partnerships complicate tracking
Pages per user	Neilsen implies 60 minute sessions; 60 pages per session; over 700 per week 2,400/month over 20 hours	Additive across domains Videos, Open Social, and games reduce relevancy of impressions as metric RSS feeds counted separately from pages
Ads per page	comscore says 35.1 per visit TechCrunch serves dozens per page Google serves 4 per skyscraper Trillions per day	Gadgets serve ads to panels of a page Games serve many ads per session Video serves prerolls, postrolls
Clicks	User clicks on ads - 0.1% to 0.9%	Click fraud Habitual clickers Accidental clicks
Retention	Repeat user	Case, New York Times

(c) Dash Chang, 2008

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