In order to be able to provide its advertising clients with coverage data, Yahoo! Deutschland is a member of AGOF, the German study group for online research. mgm technology partners helped Yahoo! Deutschland to create the technical conditions required for accurate AGOF measurements. In accomplishing this, we helped to automate and simplify technical processes.

Initial situation and task definition

One of the prerequisites for sound media planning in the online advertising business is the possession of officially recognized web site traffic data. In Germany, quality-assured traffic data are collected and made available by AGOF, an independent study group for online research. The AGOF method, which makes current coverage and structural data available for the internet world, has become established as the standard point of reference in Germany.

The challenge here is to accurately determine these data. To do this, AGOF has developed a three-pillar model comprising:

• Technical measurement,
• On site questionnaires and
• Representative surveys of the population via telephone calls.

The project carried out by mgm technology partners is related to the “technical measurement” part of this model. For technical measurements to be performed, a specific tag in HTML code – a so-called counting pixel – needs to be embedded on every page of an advertising vehicle. Another page impression is then counted when this counting pixel is called up.

The advertising vehicle itself – in this case Yahoo! Deutschland – is respon-sible for integrating the counting pixel tag on each page. For the higher level of automation Yahoo! Deutschland demanded for this process, the following steps were required:

• Performance of quality assurance measures on all pages of Yahoo! Deutschland for complete (i.e. on every page) and correct inclusion of the counting pixel on the pages.
• Development and introduction of software-supported processes ensuring that the counting pixel is automatically embedded in newly generated pages at Yahoo! Deutschland.

Standardized processes for all employees

At Yahoo! Deutschland, every product manager is not only directly responsible for every web page that he or she generates or attends to, but also has a duty to ensure that the counting pixel is included on every web page in accordance with the AGOF requirements. The objective was to take the automation of this pixel inclusion process to a higher level.

Starting from this situation, mgm initially began to analyze the existing processes and to define new work steps. From this, a standardized procedure was then developed, with the intention of enabling every employee to use the new procedure when generating new pages.

In order to automate the defined processes, mgm developed a web-based software application which was designed to be particularly intuitive and user-friendly.

The fact that this claim to user-friendliness has been successfully met is underlined by the fact that – even within a very short space of time – the internal support and control teams of Yahoo! Deutschland have been able to directly resolve queries arising from ongoing use of the new system.

International communications

In view of the international organizational structure of Yahoo! this project necessitated communications between AGOF (a German one-off) and project managers of other national organizations, and therefore international communications on the part of mgm. On this basis, a small mgm development team implemented the business logic in the portal.

Benefits for Yahoo! Deutschland

By automating the process of embedding the counting pixel on every page, mgm has helped to secure the quality of sales and marketing information at Yahoo! Deutschland.

* This reference has been officially confirmed by Yahoo! Deutschland.