Nielsen Online's AdRelevance comes to SA

AdRelevance is an online advertising tracking system based on spidering technology and a team of advertising categorisers employed by Nielsen Online. According to Nielsen, it gives detailed insight into which companies and brands are advertising online, which websites are running campaigns and what type of advertising, creative content, duration and frequency those campaigns entail.

“Much anticipated”

Commented Andrew Felbert, Nielsen international marketing manager, “We are very pleased to be launching in South Africa, increasing our AdRelevance data worldwide coverage of markets. The online advertising intelligence data has been much anticipated by online industry players as it supports the full online ad planning, management and evaluation process.

“The reporting delivers detailed data on the number of campaigns, the composition of media schedules as well as the ad creatives, equipping clients with a better understanding of online campaign performance. In addition, AdRelevance distributes real-time email alerts that provide clients with tactical information on competitive and market activity.”

Ken McArthur, Nielsen Media South Africa MD, added: “We strongly believe that the introduction of the service in SA will make an enormous contribution to the development of the countries' online advertising market. It has proven itself in many countries around the world as an essential tool for optimising your online advertising strategy.”

AdRelevance is a worldwide service, and provides daily updated online advertising intelligence for the US, fourteen European countries and seven Asia Pacific markets in total.

The first round of AdRelevance insights in South Africa collected over April 2009 reveals that 1982 campaigns were run during the month (see Table 1). These campaigns consisted of 5570 banners run by 1405 advertisers. Also, Table 2 lists the top 10 advertisers for the month of April 2009.

How does it work?

AdRelevance's spiders behave as if they are SA Internet users surfing the web. They continuously visit hundreds of commercial sites and search the HTML information for click counters, which indicate that an advertisement is present on the page. The spiders examine the creative and register it in the database, meaning an updated version is available every day. Dedicated Nielsen Online processing staff process the data in order to categorise and summarise it for final presentation to the market.

What are the benefits?

Online visitors in SA represent an appealing audience for advertisers and their advertising agencies who can use AdRelevance to see where, what and when their competitors are advertising online and optimise their own campaigns accordingly. In addition, website owners who offer online advertising space can understand through AdRelevance what advertising is running on competitive sites and which advertisers and sectors are most active, which enables targeted sales efforts and will lead to maximised ROI.