howard | 
12 18th, 2006| 
This topics been around for a while this year already but I recently discussed it with a friend of mine over lunch and so thought I’d stick a post up about it.
It seems that as we’re all falling in love with AJAX (and by association other technologies such as Adobe Flex which offer similar functionality) we’re forgetting about how these technologies are affecting the banner side of the industry which is, love it or hate it, a big part of what we as digital marketers do.
Basically, whilst AJAX improves the user experience bringing in the data dynamically, in the background, without reloading the page, it harms the number of banner impressions, the standard way of measuring ads online, because the page doesn’t reload. Not reloading means that the number of impressions is basically way lower than expected.
What this is meaning in particular, is that on many sites, and one particular large portal, the number of impressions, when measured in the traditional way as set out by the IAB, is extremely low. This calls for one of two actions.
First off, the easiest thing to do would be to remove the ajax, go back to the old ways, and let the page reload. But this is counter productive and not great for the usability of the sites we’re now used to.
The second is to change the ways that impressions are created and measured, making them ajax friendly and to generate impressions either through timebased refreshing (although this isn’t ideal, as commented on here by Eric Picard in a great post on the subject over at Clickz) or by really looking at the application/site you are creating, and identifying points in it when the application would "traditionally" refresh itself. Then, make an ajax based ad-refresh call at that point instead.
I guess overall the way we as an industry measure ad impressions will need to change as things go more and more down the ajax route - but for now, it’s worthwhile thinking it through so you don’t end up damaging potential ad revenue with an interface that is almost too clever for it’s own good.
Howard
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