Changes in the URL are catalogued and compared to AdRelevance's pool of ad traffic, rate and design data. With this competitive information in hand, clients like Mitsubishi and Gateway can steer advertising efforts to where foes are marketing, or quickly respond to competitors' claims. The service can also be used by companies to keep tabs on their own online campaigns. It strives for reality instead of a projection, and that's something media planners crave. Relying on rate cards makes the system's spending information suspect, Singer says.
Nobody pays rate card.
The technology still can't track the demographics of the ad's audience or whether it entices people to click. And the limited pool of sites means major advertising destinations like Geocities aren't covered. These are the areas NetRatings specializes in. All of this behavior is projected out to the Web audience as a whole, and then synthesized into a syndicated weekly report. It's very similar to the way Nielsen tracks television ratings.