Online publishers are being put under pressure by media agencies and advertisers to provide audience data that is transparent, accurate and which has been verified by an independent audit.
In a letter sent to members yesterday, the Media Federation of Australia (MFA) implored agencies to demand from those online publishers they spend with, independently audited web data from the Audit Bureaux of Australia (ABA).
The move to place pressure on web publishers follows the launch of the ABA’s Web Audit Service in June, which is being run by Nielsen Online and sees tags from its Market Intelligence system placed on websites to verify traffic claims made by publishers. The MFA said audits can verify audience numbers and prevent the manipulation of website traffic through “non-user requested content” such as auto-refresh, as well as the placement of tags and double counting issues.
Gary Hardwick, president of the MFA, questioned whether unaudited publisher sites could be trusted.
“Our industry spends billions a year making media placement decisions and rightly so, our clients are increasingly looking for confidence in the decisions we are making on their business - this is why transparency and accuracy of data and information is mandatory.
“The ABA audited web data process, without question provides this confidence and I encourage our industry to be extremely cautious about using numbers that have not agreed to undergo this process to make these commercial decisions. The truth is in the detail and for sites that are not audited, can we believe in the numbers?”
ABA audited data only reports user-requested and user-focused data, and excludes automatic content such as auto-refresh pages, pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials and auto-play rich media content.
Gordon Towell, CEO of the ABA, said: “It has become absolutely clear that media buyers and advertisers are now demanding the same level of accountability and comparability of web audience data as exists for print media. There is now no reason for any publisher not to participate given the low-cost to audit and the opportunity to provide credible information to their media buyers and advertisers.”
Kerry Field, digital committee chair of the MFA and partner, innovation, at Mindshare, added: “There are a number of ways that measurement data using the tagging methodology can be manipulated. The release of these rules and guidelines and the audits conducted by the ABA ensures publishers data collection procedure are compliant and reported on a consistent basis – an important achievement for the online medium.”
