IFABC WWW Standards Group
The aim of the IFABC
is the sharing of knowledge and experience to encourage best practice.
This is especially the case for electronic media such as the Internet,
where the IFABC as a group has taken the initiative to create and
evolve a globally agreed set of metrics.This has been achieved through the IFABC www standards group which has
delivered agreed metrics for many areas of site centric (i.e. census
based) measurement of electronic media. The most popular area to date
is in the measurement of website traffic. It is important to note that the industry as a whole has been keen to ensure that IFABC does not impose a single methodology at this early stage in the development of these new media.
That said, the metrics have also been agreed on the basis that any
website can use them and that most of the counting tools currently
available can, when properly configured and managed, deliver data to
these standards.
The details of the audits that individual IFABC member Audit Bureaux
deliver for websites are available direct from those Bureaux.
The common metrics are based on agreed principles. These include the
exclusion of internal traffic, the exclusion of robotic traffic based
on a common list of robots and then interpretive tests by the auditor.
This latter area is important as the volume of robotic traffic may be
as high as 60% or even more in some cases.
For details of the standards group and metrics please see standards.htm
The group has also delivered standards for email measurement which can be found at emailstds.htm
For further information on this work please email richard.foan@abce.org.uk