The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), with the assistance of the Media Rating Council (MRC) have produced the first standardized key metrics for measuring mobile ads.

The Mobile Web Advertising Measurement Guidelines provide a framework to govern how ad impressions are counted on the mobile web. A joint task force, comprised of members of the IAB’s Mobile Advertising Committee and the MMA’s Measurement Committee, met for more than a year to develop the guidelines.

“The Mobile Web Advertising Measurement Guidelines will help marketers accurately assess the delivery of ads within mobile websites and offer a clear way to count ad impressions, assuring them that their advertising messages are reaching mobile consumers,” says Anna Bager, vice president and general manager of the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence.

MMA president and CEO, Greg Stuart, says that, more than anything, the guidelines demonstrate the mobile industry’s commitment to its marketing partners to create a transparent and consistent business environment for buying and selling ads.

“Brands and their agencies will be further encouraged to devote resources towards marketing campaigns unique to the mobile web – reaching customers at critical times in the purchase cycle, enhancing brand relationships, or providing critical information through mobile marketing,” says Stuart. 

The objectives of the “Mobile Web Advertising Measurement Guidelines” include:

• Defining the mobile web ad impression
• Creating a common methodology that will be widely adopted in the U.S. and globally for counting mobile web ad impressions
• Encouraging US mobile web ad servers to have their impression counts audited by an independent third party
• Providing marketers and agencies with greater clarity and certainty (via the auditing process) that key metrics used for buying mobile web ads are methodologically sound and meet the highest standards available to the media industry
• Reducing levels of discrepancies and spurring the industry’s growth by offering Internet publishers and ad servers a consistent, rigorous way to count the delivery of ad impressions

The IAB’s Mobile Advertising Committee is comprised of over 140 member companies who are dedicated to developing and expanding the mobile space as a viable advertising platform. The committee sits under the newly-created IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, which is intended to serve as an industry-wide resource for innovation in mobile advertising.

The MMA’s Measurement Committee is comprised of MMA member companies.  The Measurement Committee’s charter is to provide global leadership in all aspects of mobile media measurement.

The Mobile Web Advertising Guidelines are available for download here.