Challenges in Online Advertising Measurement

Online Advertising is the only form of advertising that is measurable but there are a few challenges or drawbacks of online advertising that we need to understand. Some of the most common ones are listed below:

· Cookie Window: The cookie window needs to be set based on each business objective. Some businesses might have a longer purchase or research cycle which would mean consumers take more time to convert after they see the ad, example laptops computers. Whereas, there would be some business where the consumers would convert quicker. Thus, we cannot have a common cookie window for all the businesses.
· Cookie, Work vs. Home: Many consumers would see and click on the ad at home but might complete the transaction at home or vice versa. So, the cookie would not be able to close the loop and the advertiser would miss out on counting the revenue or the conversion based on the online advertising.
· Last Click: Typically, the ad servers reporting systems attribute the conversion to the last click and miss out on the multi-touch aspect. For example if a consumer clicks on a banner and then clicks on a Paid Search and then converts, the Paid Search gets 100% credit but the display ad also had some contribution in driving the consumer to the website and increase the consumer’s interest in the product.
· Cookie Deletion: It is knows that consumers tend to delete cookies from their computers. So, if the cookie is deleted, the ad server will not be able to connect the conversion to the ad unit that the consumer was exposed to or had clicked on. There is also an issue of 3rd party cookie deletion vs. 1st party cookie deletion. The 3rd party cookie deletion is more prevalent than the 1st party cookie deletion.
· Tags not firing: Several times the tags stop firing when expected example at the conversion event confirmation page – this could be due to many unexplained reasons and the sometimes all it needs is a tag refresh. It has also been seen that sometimes the IT personnel by mistake change the tag format and it does not work. One way to QC this problem is by using tools like HTTPlook.