NEWS12 March 2012
UK— Nielsen is laying the groundwork for the launch of its online campaign ratings service in the UK, following a successful rollout in the US.
Unilever has signed on as a client to have all of its online advertising measured in this way. The deal is US only for now, but the consumer goods firm has said it is looking to use the same approach in other markets.
Online campaign ratings provide reach, frequency and gross rating point measures for online adverts.
The system works using pixel-tracking, so that when a particular display or video advertisement is shown in a browser its embedded tag pings Nielsen’s servers, which in turn ping a call to the web user’s browser to check whether they are a Facebook user. If a Facebook cookie is found, this triggers a call to Facebook which can then assign age and gender information for the user who encountered that ad tag.
At the end of each day Facebook delivers to Nielsen aggregate-level reports for each ad tag containing reach and frequency information in anonymous age and gender buckets. The ad tags are decrypted by Nielsen and performance reports are sent to advertisers.
One of the main selling points of the system, according to Nielsen, is that metrics produced by online campaign ratings are comparable to TV ratings. In the US, where Nielsen is the currency provider of TV audience data, the company is at an advanced stage of testing for the delivery of cross-media campaign ratings.
Nielsen has yet to announce a date for the launch of online campaign ratings in the UK. The system will work the same way as it does in the US, with Facebook as a partner, and the company will also look to follow the US launch of cross-media campaign ratings with a UK equivalent.