Tracking brought down to earth

NetGravity next week will release AdServer 2.0, a new version of its software that allows Webmasters to manage and track the placement of banner ads on their sites.

More than 30 ad-supported sites are using NetGravity's first version of the software, released in February. They include the Web's busiest site, Netscape Communications; the most complex publishing site online, Time Warner's Pathfinder; new customer Barrons Online; Individual; Quote.com; and Red Herring magazine.

"NetGravity realizes that when a revenue-generating application is not working, a site is losing money," said John Danner, NetGravity president. "We deliver an ad management tool which is 100 percent reliable under the most demanding conditions."

"NetGravity has shown the ability to scale to Netscape's Internet site, which receives more than 100 million hits a day," Robert Andrews, Netscape's Webmaster, said in a statement.

Among its new features, NetGravity 2.0:
--lets sites target ad to specific visitors based on browser type, computer platform, nation of origin, proxy server, domain name, search terms, keywords, time of day, and day of week. Sites can create other target groups using "cookies."
--lets the Web or content server place the ads, rather than the ad server, for a site's most popular pages. That "intelligent caching" means ads get to visitors faster.
--creates standard reports or enables Webmasters to format their own reports.
--gives sites the ability to add new ad servers as visitor traffic grows.
--generates online reports for each advertiser.

"Receiving performance reports from NetGravity sites has been fantastic in order to evaluate our media buys and make any rotation changes necessary in a timely manner," Melissa Hoban, media planner at ad agency J. Walter Thompson, said in a statement.