AdRelevance Debuts New Version of Ad Measurement Technology

Touting its ability to better track the ever-changing movements of Web pages and traffic, Jupiter Media Metrix’ AdRelevance division on Monday unveiled the second-generation of its technology, which provides marketers with information about creatives, placements, and advertisers.

“The Internet is really characterized by this kind of ebb and flow,” said Charles Buchwalter, vice president of media at AdRelevance. “What may have been correct for one week or month may totally change the next.”

The new service is meant to improve upon the old by marrying Media Metrix panel data — which helps the company determine what sites to monitor — with “granular traffic data” from undisclosed sources. That detailed information about which URLs are getting the most traffic informs the “bot” technology, which then crawls the Web in search of banner ads, buttons, and rich media advertising formats.

The result: more comprehensive information about who is advertising where and when — important for advertisers, agencies, and Web site publishers. AdRelevance says the number of advertisements it captures will swell from 6,000 to 10,000 a week. The new methodology is also designed to better capture short-term events like advertising surrounding holidays and special events — the Super Bowl, for example.

The support of rich media is another addition to this iteration of the technology. Currently, only ads created in Flash can be measured, but company officials say support for Enliven, Unicast, and Bluestreak ads is in the works. The new version also brings in more information — impression and rate-card based spending data — on ad formats other than standard banners.

Additionally, the company has beefed up its technology for classifying and sorting advertisements, which it says will help it scale as the number of Web advertisements grows.

The company is still lagging, though, on the number of Web sites it crawls. Competitor Leading Web Advertisers tracks more than 2000 sites, while AdRelevance measures only 1000. Leading Web Advertisers also updates its data daily, while AdRelevance presents its information to clients on a weekly basis.