Banner Ad
The most ubiquitous and successful of all forms of Web site promotion. These relatively small graphical banners serve much as billboards or print ads (with limited animation) towards communicating a message or eliciting a response from the end-user/viewer. As the most commodifiable form of Web advertising, banner ads support Web content which is free to the Web surfing audience.

Bookmarks and Direct Accesses
Lilypad provides information that will be useful in evaluating other non-Web means of accessing a Web site. Bookmarks and Direct Accesses provide the total number of visits that can be attributed to those accessing your Web site either by manually typing in your URL, or by calling up their user defined bookmarks. Falls into the category of an intentional or premeditated visit.

CASIE
Coalition of Advertiser Supported Information and Entrainment. This is a joint collaboration between the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies which concerns itself primarily with interactive advertising developments and trends.

Casual Traffic
The first, or leftmost figure in each cell of the performance history report is a summation of Web-based hyperlinks and Newsgroup generated traffic, dependent on hyperlinks found on other sites (including if applicable, banner advertising). A good indicator of users casually surfing around that find your Web site, typically representing some 2/3 of most Web site's traffic.

Causal Site
The Web site responsible for driving a visit to another Web site, usually through a hyperlink reference.

Cells and Periods
In the historical performance report, Lilypad displays a grid of cells which contain numerical information on particular time periods. Each cell or period, represents a user-defined unit of time, featuring three small typeface figures (casual, intentional and unknown origin visits) and a larger typeface figure indicating total visit activity during that time period. If Lilypad does not have enough data to fill all of the cells requested, it will display an empty cell.

Clickthrough
The basic unit of response to the banner ad, or other form of Web site promotion. Some commercial Web media suppliers provide this information, while others do not. A clickthrough is essentially an undifferentiated visit before the advertiser's Web site is downloaded to the requesting Web browser.

The range of clickthroughs varies greatly, and can be from zero to 25% depending on a number of factors including: banner ad creative, Web media placement, and relative amplitude, i.e. what other banner advertisers are doing on that single content-providers Web site at the same time.

CPM
Cost per thousand is the lingua franca of the advertising media industry online as well as in traditional media. It is generally used with gross impressions or exposures delivered in television and print advertising, and often refers to pieces delivered in direct-response.

Cost per Click
Similarly, cost per click is a measurement of response-oriented banner advertising which refers to the price paid for delivering one clickthrough to the advertiser's destination Web site.

Destination/Monitored Web pages
Lilypad allows you to monitor the traffic source data for up to 99 destination Web pages located on your Web server. Once you designate the monitored Web page by file path and name, you'll simply need to click the update button to mark that page for continuous Lilypad tracking. Lilypad will then monitor all traffic coming into that Web page, and store that data online until you request it in an historical performance report. Lilypad presently cannot monitor dynamically generated Web pages, i.e. non-HTML files.

Editorial Hyperlink
A visit which generated by a Web surfer clicking on an unpaid hyperlink to a commercial Web site from a commercial content-provider. Typically, this phenomenon occurs when an article is written about a company, it's product or it's Web site in a Web-based story. Usually a randomly occurring brief but high-volume source of traffic. A unique byproduct is volume taper off then stickiness. No money is exchanged. Unless one visits the causal site, it's difficult to tell whether the editorial coverage was positive or negative.

Frequency
In terms of awareness, refers to the number of times that a specific individual may have been exposed to a Web advertiser's specific banner ads. Many have noted the diminishing returns observed after the third exposure of a banner ad, i.e. if a Web surfer does not respond to a banner ad by the third time they have been exposed they are significantly less likely to respond on the fourth attempt.

Goodwill Hyperlink
Conceptually the same as an editorial hyperlink, a goodwill hyperlink can be caused by individuals and others linking to a Web site for no other reason than they like it. Usually a constant and growing source of low-volume traffic, if the destination Web site is interesting. No money is exchanged.

Grand Total
In the historical performance report, Lilypad provides the total amount of traffic at the bottom of the statistics table as determined by the user-defined period of time, and the number of periods selected for that particular report.

Impressions/Exposures
The fundamental unit of awareness and typically sold by the thousand, impressions and exposures connote that the end-user has been exposed to a given banner ad, or that an impression has been created in their mind. As in other media, there is no guarantee that the viewer has actually seen the ad. As a result, most Web media place banner ads at the top of the Web page.

Ignore/Restore
Lilypad will allow you to completely ignore traffic generated from either specific URLs, or from an entire domain. This information will not show up in either the traffic summary or historical performance reports. Should you change your mind at a later date, Lilypad allows you to restore these URLs or domains for reporting purposes.

Historical Performance Report
The most useful Lilypad reporting system allows you to research the performance of a particular source of traffic in a number of useful ways. Lilypad allows you to view aggregate site traffic totals over a user-defined periods (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually), and also allows you to control the number of periods or cells displayed (15, 30, 60. 90, 120).

Additionally, Lilypad allows you to examine spotlighted Web sites in this report, and follow their activity under various conditions down to the day.

IAB
Internet Advertising Bureau - A trade organization representing suppliers of Web advertising, and specialist Web media buyers and planners.

Intentional Traffic
The second, or middle figure in each cell of the performance history report represents a summation of the Bookmarks and Direct Accesses traffic as well as Local HTML files. Intentional traffic which groups Web surfers that thought about visiting your site before they actually visited, typically accounts for the remaining 1/3 of Web traffic.

Local HTML files
Lilypad provides the total number of visits that were caused by Web surfers calling up their own local HTML files, stored on either local hard drives or floppies. Observation suggests that this most commonly occurs in schools where terminals are shared, and bookmarking via browser is discouraged.

Mean
The most basic statistical indicator is the summation of all period traffic totals, divided by the number of time periods in the performance history report. Since it considers, past performance this figure is backward-looking. The arithmetic average is a measure of central tendency, and for the purposes of Web promotion implies future traffic clustering around this figure.

Median
The median represents the midpoint period traffic total of all period traffic totals contained in the performance history report. The relationship between the the mean and the median in your report may suggest skewing or trends in your traffic.

Mode
The mode represents the most commonly occurring traffic level in the performance history report. The Lilypad mode provides the period traffic totals which occurred most frequently.

Newsgroups
Lilypad can also determine the number of visits that were caused by Web surfers clicking on hyperlinks embedded in Newsgroups. Lilypad will provide a hyperlink to the Newsgroup that caused the visit in the traffic summary report.

Range: Hi - Lo
The most basic measure of variability, the range statistic simply provides the maximum and minimum traffic summary data for the performance history report.

Reach
A throwback from traditional media advertising, reach has been difficult to ascertain on the Web for a number of reasons. It is possible to estimate (with some difficulty) what most commercial Web suppliers are delivering in terms of gross impressions during a given period of time. As a Web advertiser your share of the possible audience or "reach," might be expressed as a percentage of that estimated total. Conceptually similar to aggregate amplitude.

Spotlight
Lilypad let's you get to the beef quickly. Once you have found specific traffic generating hyperlinks or domains, you can spotlight those sources of traffic in both traffic summary and performance history reports. For example, if you were following traffic being generated by a banner ad on Hotwired, a keyword in Yahoo!, and a reference to your Web on a What's New page, Lilypad can feature all of those links in the traffic summary reports once you've selected them. What's more, Lilypad allows you to view the aggregate performance history of these spotlighted sources of traffic down to the day.

Standard Deviation
The standard deviation provides a reference to the true variability of the period traffic data for the report. The standard deviation is the average distance from the mean of each period's traffic total in the report. Within the context of Lilypad, a small standard deviation suggests stable traffic patterns, while a large figure indicates wild fluctuations in traffic levels.

Statistics
In the Lilypad software, all performance history reports include a seven parameter statistical summary. These statistics provide a snapshot of what's going on, and can be quite useful in performing before, during, and after analysis in evaluating specific Web promotions.

Traffic Source Data
Lilypad creates it's own proprietary log files, which are available for your later viewing and analysis. Lilypad differentiates between causal Web sites, Newsgroup, Bookmarks and Direct Access and Local HTML file initiated traffic. Note, that Lilypad can only begin to provide report data after it's been correctly installed and configured on the Web server.

Traffic Summary Report
The most basic Lilypad report also provides a load of useful, albeit very detailed information. These reports essentially allow you to view traffic source data as generated by your Web site by either viewing a previous time period, or an up to date real-time report.

In the real-time traffic summary report, Lilypad will generate a comparative report summarizing traffic generated during the present time period, and the immediately preceding period. You may define the time period as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually or allow for a comprehensive total which looks at your entire Lilypad data archive. Provided in the real-time report is a simple volume and percentage delta comparison between this period and the previous period.

Most likely, you'll use the daily default setting, which let's you see how well your Web site is doing today so far, as compared to the totals for yesterday. When investigating Web site activity you can review a previous time period, and make note of any unusual traffic sources or trends that coincide with Web media promotions.

Unknown Origin
This figure represents an erratic response to Lilypad. Overall this represents a very small percentage (usually around 1%) of total daily traffic, and typically is caused by Web surfers using very old non-graphical browsers.

Web Sites
Lilypad will provide a list of causal hyperlinked URLs, and order them by volume of traffic generated this period link by link, given your reporting parameters. The total figure for the period is provided at the bottom of the first table, at the top of the traffic summary report.

Web Site Promotion
The art and science of generating traffic into a Web site. Often accomplished by purchasing or bartering banner advertising. Other means of gaining Web site promotion include online editorial, and goodwill links as well as direct email and Newsgroup seeding.

Web Marketer
A generic term which includes all of the communications specialists involved with the marketing of a product or service in the Web medium. Web advertisers, promotions and publicity folks can be on the corporate, agency or developer side - they're all Web marketer's.

Visit
The fundamental unit of behavior which Lilypad tracks, providing valuable information about how folks came to find your Web site. Instead of specifying unique visitors, Lilypad provides information at the unspecified visit level as defined by CASIE.

© 1995 Streams Online Media Development, Corp.