A recent survey by the market research company Real Opinions shows that 87% of those involved in advertising or marketing for their organisations in the Middle East said that transparency in website visitor numbers and profiles of visitors would be influential in increasing their usage of the Internet for advertising.

Put into perspective, 58% claim their budgets for marketing and advertising have decreased, but the current economic climate has encouraged them to look online for maximizing their impact, with 37% claiming their interest in the Internet has increased (50% claim no change).

Dan Healy, the CEO of Real Opinions who conducted the survey commented, 'With decreasing budgets, organisations appear to be looking around for new paradigms in which to conduct their advertising and marketing activities to help them reach their goals. They are looking at the Internet advertising industry and websites to help them justify a new approach.'

'As the Internet allows users to follow their special interests, websites have the ability to accurately show how unique their visitors are and how it can match an advertiser's target market they wish to reach with communication. It's shouldn't just be how many visitors a website receives, advertisers want to know the profile of these people. This in turn can provide a very cost efficient advertising model for many organisations to achieve the return on investment they seek in this economic climate,' Dan added.

In order to help educate advertisers and build their confidence in the Internet advertising industry, Real Opinions have launched the website audience measurement tool Effective Measure in the Middle East which provides a more accurate calculation of unique visitors/browsers and an in-depth demographic, lifestyle and personality assessment of website visitors to encourage advertisers and their media buyers to be more targeted and efficient with increasingly scarce advertising budgets.

Healy added, 'One of the major issues facing the website audience measurement industry over recent years has been the impact of cookie deletion on website visitor computers. Take the example of someone visiting a website in the morning, deleting their cookies at midday and re-visiting this same website in the afternoon. Website visitor measurement should be clear whether their website measurement software records this person/browser as another new visitor/browser or someone returning with this scenario. The result of this can be a significant overestimation of the unique browsers/visitors who visit and in turn see advertising on a website.'

Recent research with business Internet users in the Middle East shows the magnitude of this issue. Almost 1 in 3 computers at work and home are deleting cookies at least once every day (29% and 27% respectively) and over 6 in 10 on a monthly basis.

Healy added, 'The good news is these websites might have greater loyalty with returning visitors than they previously thought, while advertisers can learn from this to modify their advertising strategy appropriately to improve effectiveness.'

Effective Measure has the solution to the issue of cookie deletion with a patent pending solution called Digital Helix. Tests show that it acts like a bridge to identify this returning visitor and not count them as a different person/browser.