Some Very Modest Good News on Advertising and Ajax

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, February 28, 2008 @ 5:31 pm

Every month I check in on the state of advertising and Ajax. Nielsen has ditched the page view, but they've really shrugged their shoulders at how to measure traffic for advertising purposes on Ajax-enabled web sites. To make things worse, even Google, a pioneer in many things Ajax, is mum on Ajax and Adsense. Just search through their help forums for all of the unanswered questions on how to make Adsense work with Ajax sites. This deafening silence on Google's part (not even a "don't do it"), leads me to believe that they are either working on a solution but don't want to tip their hand, or that they are just as out to sea as everyone else.

So, the modest good news is that some people are working to solve the measurement problem. In the case of search recommendations, Baynote measures interest in the targets of search results, then reranks those results based on that interest. In other words, if someone goes to a search result, scrolls through the page, leafs through a couple of DHTML tabs, etc., then they probably found the page interesting. If, on the other hand, they only spend a second deciding that the page sucks, then go back to the search results, then they probably found the page uninteresting. 

A more generalized tool for web analytics is provided by Alenty.
Their tool measures visbility and activity of elements on the page.
Their demo demonstrates how their tool can measure how much time you
spend viewing the main article of a post versus the comments. From
reading the technical description (apparently it's based on GWT), it
seems more sophisticated tracking with RIA's is possible. ReadWriteWeb
also has an extensive review of the product. Ajaxian also has a thing or two on Alenty.

While
these two companies and products don't begin to solve the lack of
action on the advertising measurement front, at least they could
provide a technical foundation for tools once Nielsen gets its head out
of its ass.

Technorati Tags: ajax, advertising, analytics, nielsen, baynote, alenty, gwt

agile ajax

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