I S S E L - Pilot HitList Cheapflights case study

Cheapflights makes the ABC Electronic Grade with Pilot HitList

Cheapflights has become the largest ever travel site to produce a certified ABC ELECTRONIC audit. Covering the July 2002 audit period, it measured how more than 1.2 million monthly unique users used the site through the Pilot HitList counting solution - a trailblazing initiative it anticipates will attract more advertisers to the site.

Many of the UK’s online travel players continue to publish unaudited data, making advertising buying decisions difficult to make. Despite the claims by some companies that proper online traffic auditing is too complex and expensive, Cheapflights achieved this critical certification in less than a month, and regards the cost of the project to be a sound investment buying credibility that will reap dividends.

“Until now, the online travel market has had every advantage over offline agents apart from rock solid measurement standards. ABC ELECTRONIC auditing fills this hole,” commented David Soskin, chief executive officer of Cheapflights. He added, “Since 1996 Cheapflights has built up a leading position in the online travel advertising market. We fully intend to use our certification to continue to build on this role as the travel portal of choice for the UK travel trade. We chose to work with Pilot HitList because it could identify what is and isn’t needed to achieve ABC ELECTRONIC certification. We now have a pioneering system that once again proves to advertisers that Cheapflights is a great place to be seen online.”

Pilot Software’s UK distributor ISSEL is an ABC ELECTRONIC Associate Subscriber and was able to support Cheapflights through the process of turning complex web usage data into meaningful statistics. Richard Foan, managing director of ABC ELECTRONIC said, "ISSEL's knowledge of ABC ELECTRONIC's requirements through their status as an ABCE Associate Subscriber means they can help clients achieve certification to industry agreed standards. ISSEL's success in supporting Cheapflights to certification illustrates well how analytics technology can be used to deliver accurate audience data.”

Colin Cooper, sales director at ISSEL added, “ABC ELECTRONIC is now Britain’s industry agreed trading currency for Internet advertising. If online publishers don’t get their technology talking ABC’s language they risk losing credibility. It’s not about costly software projects – it’s about collaborating to get the audit trail right.”

What Pilot HitList does
Achieving ABC ELECTRONIC Certification requires sites to count their traffic in compliance with the agreed industry rules, as set by JICWEBS in the UK and Ireland. This is too frequently perceived as difficult because collected data must be filtered to extract the true answers about how a site or service is being used. Another common goal of online publishers is to ensure website analytics do not interrupt their normal service by placing extra demands on their servers.

Pilot HitList tackles these problems systematically. First, it operates independently of the server, so it does not interfere with the speed or reliability of the service. Second, it is designed to draw out only the important data from the meaningless mass available.

Identifying the real number of Page Impressions is essential because the alternative of 'hits' is worthless as each Page Impression is typically made up of many separate files that therefore generate many hits in the server log. The analytics software must ignore all but the hits driven by valid users requesting something, discarding multiple hits generated by the same request as well as other invalid types of activity - for example traffic driven by robots feeding the indexes of search engines. Only then can the permitted levels of activity on a site be measured.
Another challenge faced by the industry is that from standard log file data there is currently no simple way of measuring the actual number of people using an internet site. The Industry has therefore agreed a 'common currency' metric against which ABC ELECTRONIC audits. This approximates the number of unique devices that access a site, providing a comparable measure of audience size. Pilot HitList is able to sift through and combine information captured in different data fields to calculate User statistics.