Surround sessions are
advertising
Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a Product (business), product or Service (economics), service. Advertising aims to present a product or service in terms of utility, advantages, and qualities of int ...
sequences in which a visitor receives ads from one advertiser throughout an entire site visit.
Recently introduced by the online unit of the
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
, the "surround session" is creating a major buzz in the
online advertising
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...
community. The session model represents a potentially significant shift in the way advertisers view
online media
In mass communication, digital media is any communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronic ...
, as more emphasis is placed on the real interaction between advertisers and
audience
An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they are called "readers"), theatre, music (in which they are called "listeners"), video games (in which they are called "players"), or ...
s.
Process
In a surround session, an advertiser has all or most of the ads on each page for a visitor's entire site visit. As the visitor moves from page to page, the same advertiser is represented in various ad placements. This could allow for reinforcement of an advertiser's message, or possibly the creative use of a story line across several pages.
As currently proposed, an advertiser only pays for sessions that reach a predetermined amount of
pageview
In web analytics and Website governance, website management, a pageview or page view, abbreviated in business to PV and occasionally called page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file (web page) of an Internet site. On the World Wide ...
s, and does not pay for any views in short sessions or the extra views in long sessions.
The number of guaranteed page views per session is likely to vary, depending on what buyers are looking to purchase and what
publisher
Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...
s are able to deliver.
Impact
The move to a session-based model might even give new life to beleaguered
metric
Metric or metrical may refer to:
Measuring
* Metric system, an internationally adopted decimal system of measurement
* An adjective indicating relation to measurement in general, or a noun describing a specific type of measurement
Mathematics
...
s such as the
click-through rate
Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of clicks on a specific link to the number of times a page, email, or advertisement is shown. It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website, as well ...
. Many marketers equate a 1% click-through rate with only 1 in 100 visitors clicking on an advertisement. At best, this assumption is slightly imprecise... at worst, it is grossly inaccurate. For example, assume that a particularly "sticky" site averages 11 page views per visitor and a 3% click-through rate. This means that up to 33% of the audience could have responded to the advertisement, assuming no duplicate clicks.
Perhaps most significantly, the surround session is one of the first advertising ideas in recent times that does not further degrade the user experience. This new method of packaging ads does not require longer
download
In computer networks, download means to ''receive'' data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar systems. This contrasts with uploading, where data is ''sent to'' a remote ...
times, more screen space, or annoying
browser tricks.
See also
*
Advertising inventory
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Surround Sessions
Advertising