NEW YORK — Internet audience measurement service Nielsen//NetRatings plans a new quarterly report of the most highly trafficked packaged goods Web sites.
Launching in late January or early February, the report will target marketers whose sites do not attract the minimum 100,000 unique visitors each month that NetRatings needs to compile its weekly and monthly findings.
“The problem is that they’re not as heavily trafficked as some of the top-visited Web sites, but they have extensive needs to understand and build their Internet marketing preferences,” said Tamara Gaffney, senior product marketing manager at NetRatings, Milpitas, CA.
Potential users of this service include manufacturers of food, drugs, toiletries, candy and beverages. NetRatings, which next quarter will complete the $71.2 million purchase of ratings rival Jupiter Media Metrix, recently started tracking the automotive sector on a quarterly basis.
Though the target industry segments advertise online, their sites may not get the same amount of traffic as, say, a retailer. So, the quarterly report gives a broader view of the traffic on these sites over a longer period. Many measures will be tracked, including unique audience, time spent, frequency of visits, page views, demographic breakdowns over that period and most popular pages.
“It’s really done for the purposes of creating a more stable base and allowing you to see deeper into our data,” Gaffney said.
The first quarterly product will cover the second, third and fourth quarters of 2001, she said.
The product will be free to subscribers of NetRatings’ weekly and monthly reports. But it will be used as a prospecting tool to attract more packaged goods marketers to buy NetRatings products, including the weekly and monthly reports, and custom research.
Already available in select European markets and Australia, the quarterly report in the United States will be based on the behavior of 62,000 individuals at home and 8,000 at work.
