Jupiter Media Metrix to Roll Out New AdRelevance

Web research firm Jupiter Media Metrix will launch the new version of its AdRelevance online advertising metrics tool on Friday, enhancing user interface and increasing tracking powers.

Version 3.0 of the new product incorporates not just look-and-feel updates — which spokespeople said would make the tool easier to use — but also addresses several conspicuous shortcoming in earlier versions.

For one, AdRelevance 3.0 tracks the often-complex relationships between corporate parents and siblings — enabling users to more accurately strip out house ads from calculations, and to track spending on a particular product campaign as a percentage of a corporation’s entire online ad effort.

Additionally, the new software tracks new forms of rich media creative — including Enliven and Bluestreak. That’s become crucial to the industry in that groups like the Interactive Advertising Bureau and leaders like DoubleClick and MSN are advocating rich media creative as a way to maximize ads’ branding capabilities.

“We’re keeping pace with the industry, so our coverage is keeping pace with that which we’re tracking,” said Marc Ryan, director of media research at Jupiter Media Metrix. “We’re making more data accessible to clients in a faster, quicker way.”

AdRelevance 3.0 also contains the first marriage in a single product of data from Media Metrix and AdRelevance, in the form of demographic information. Users can query the system to analyze demographic reaches of campaigns, or of specific ads.

Another key addition is its new ability to track pop-up ads, the lack of which caused a minor public relations debacle earlier this summer.

X10.com’s now-infamous pop-under campaign boosted that company’s Web site traffic numbers into the Media Metrix “top five” traffic ranking for June, alongside AOL Time Warner, Yahoo and MSN. But critics had complained that pop-up ads — which counted a Web site “hit” with every appearance — shouldn’t be counted at all in traffic rankings, and that the results were unfairly inflated.

Now, at any rate, Jupiter’s technology will be able to weed out those ads, through Ryan denied that the inclusion of pop-up tracking was linked to the controversy.

“It’s something that we’ve always had on the agenda,” he said. “It’s always been around and just really gained notoriety over the last little while. Being able to render them [had been] a little challenging, but now we can incorporate them into system. The timing is ironic, but we’ve always had them in the agenda.”