- From: Koen Holtman <koen@win.tue.nl>
- Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 23:17:05 +0100 (MET)
- To: Dwight Merriman <dmerriman@doubleclick.net>
- Cc: http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com, dmk@allegra.att.com, montulli@netscape.com, yarong@microsoft.com
Dwight Merriman: > >I'd like to bring up one another (small) point. > >Virtually all banner advertising on the web relies on redirects for >click-throughs so that click rates can be measured. This means that the >redirection to the advertiser's web site will always be an unverifiable >transaction. The redirection won't be unverifiable if the script which does the counting and redirection to the page is on the target site already. >So, when a user visits an advertiser's site directly, cookie assignment on >the home/jump page is possible, whereas when the user visits the page via >an advertisement, it will not be possible. Yes, if the script is on the site which served the banner. But I don't see this as a big problem. >Designers of web sites (at least the large percentage who will advertise on >the web) will have to take into account that cookie assignments on their >home page may fail a large percentage of the time. If they wish to measure >number of unique visitors to their site, they will get a highly inaccurate >reading since often multiple cookies will be assignied to a single user >before one "sticks". Some careful design can work around this: suppress assignment of cookie if the referer field shows that the user comes from the click-through script. Note however that higly inaccurare readings are almost guaranteed anyway because many people disable cookies, or have browsers which do not support them. > >This is not a major flaw, but it is inelegant, and I just want to make sure >everyone has considered this. > >Dwight Koen.
Received on Wednesday, 19 March 1997 02:05:22 UTC