Advertising on mobiles is looking better than ever. Colourful and interactive, it has come a long way but has a long way to go. It is still often perceived as annoying and intrusive on small screens and, despite its huge potential, there are few accepted systems to measure it.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has worked with the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) to try and change that. For the first time, standardised key metrics for measuring ad impressions have been developed for the interactive mobile industry. 

“The ‘Mobile Web Advertising Measurement Guidelines’ will help marketers accurately assess the delivery of ads within mobile websites and offer a clear way to count ad impressions, assuring them that their advertising messages are reaching mobile consumers ,” said Anna Bager, vice president and general manager of the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence. 

“More than anything, the guidelines demonstrate the mobile industry’s commitment to its marketing partners to create a transparent and consistent business environment for buying and selling ads,” said MMA president and CEO Greg Stuart. “Brands and their agencies will be further encouraged to devote resources towards marketing campaigns unique to the mobile web- reaching customers at critical times in the purchase cycle, enhancing brand relationships or providing critical information through mobile marketing.”

The objectives of the “Mobile Web Advertising Measurement Guidelines” include:

• Defining the mobile web ad impression
• Creating a common methodology that will be widely adopted in the U.S. and globally for counting mobile web ad impressions
• Encouraging U.S. mobile web ad servers to have their impression counts audited by an independent third party
• Providing marketers and agencies with greater clarity and certainty (via the auditing process) that key metrics used for buying mobile web ads are methodologically sound and meet the highest standards available to the media industry
• Reducing levels of discrepancies and spurring the industry’s growth by offering Internet publishers and ad servers a consistent, rigorous way to count the delivery of ad impressions

The guidelines are now available for IAB members from the IAB website.