Stat of the Union
One challenge facing sabermetrics – for the uninitiated, that’s the technical term for advanced baseball analytics – was to devise a metric that works intuitively. Hits and home runs are simple, but it’s hard to boil down everything that factors into a player’s performance.
For baseball, the answer was a stat called WAR (“wins above replacement”).
Web publishers have a similar challenge as advertisers outgrow basic traffic metrics (i.e., page views and clicks).
“We’re moving from page views towards engagement data,” one publishing exec tells Digiday. “That includes unique users, the percentage of subscribers, dwell time and conversions. It’s a combined metric rather than a single number.”
But a combined metric comes with a trade-off. A page view, for example, may be basic, but “it was a big number or a small number,” says another exec, “and people understood what that meant.”
It’s understandable that publishers want to build their own advanced measures to showcase their strengths, but that makes apples-to-apples evaluation tricky. So, will advertisers and publishers ever agree on one yardstick?
“The difficulty for me is that if every publisher defines engagement differently, how easy will it be for agencies and clients to compare those definitions?” says another publisher. “Whether we call it attention or engagement, we need something that everyone can use as a common standard.”
What Do U(TM) Mean?
One of the loudest complaints about AI search is how challenging it is to measure.
Well, OpenAI just made it even harder.
Earlier this week, a number of eagle-eyed tech professionals noticed that UTM parameters were no longer appearing in the links within ChatGPT results.
Since there’s “no tag and no referrer,” those site visits are now being categorized as direct traffic, Cedric Huesler, a senior director of product management for Adobe’s brand visibility solutions, writes on LinkedIn. Huesler came to that conclusion after comparing the number of site visits attributed to direct versus ChatGPT traffic during two weeks across roughly 500 pages.
For brands tracking their AI visibility, this complicates matters, forcing them to find ways to distinguish between genuinely direct traffic and misattributed ChatGPT traffic. According to Huesler, many of the “new direct visitors behave like ChatGPT visitors.” For example, they’re more likely to see the consent banner on mobile, a sign that they’re new to a site.
The loss of that clarity hasn’t gone over well.
Removing UTMs, according to SEO and AI search consultant Lily Ray, “seems like an unnecessary step backwards.”
I Spy …
The line between advertising and surveillance is getting progressively blurrier.
Case in point: Discover-Tech, an Israeli digital advertising agency, was found to be spying on online users and hacking their devices through, you guessed it, ads.
Discover-Tech helped connect users to the servers of several spyware companies, including one called Candiru, according to a report from The Citizen Lab.
The malicious ads, which were often for benign household products, allowed Discover-Tech to identify and track users – even if they didn’t directly engage with the ad – and occasionally to plant spyware on their device.
Between 2024 and 2025, a “powerful form” of Candiru spyware delivered through Discover-Tech’s ads compromised 45 Windows devices at Qatari media organization Al Jazeera, Reuters reports, citing research from ad security firm Confiant.
Jerome Dangu, Confiant’s co-founder, tells Reuters that the ads also reached users at sensitive organizations, including the Pentagon and the International Criminal Court, as well as people in specific geographic regions. Some regions, like the Palestinian territories, were particularly saturated.
“You go to almost any site in Palestine – any site – you find a Discover-Tech ad,” Dangu says. “It gives them a very complete visibility on the digital activities of an entire country.”
But Wait! There’s More!
Can the NYT’s Wirecutter become something more than a product review site built on affiliate revenue? [Digiday]
OpenAI allows advertisers to target users based on their email address, phone number or mobile ad ID. [404 Media]
Early results from Cloudflare and OpenAI’s discovery pilot show that AI search can surface more of the web without wasteful crawling. [blog]
Product managers struggle to sunset digital products. They should just rip off the Band-Aid. [HBR]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
