Audit body warns of online tricks used to inflate audiences
The Audit Bureaux of Australia has published a report pointing out what it lists as the main dodges used by websites to artificially inflate their audience numbers.
According to the ABA, the most common trick remains autorefresh – where a publisher automatically renews the page – and ad – without the user’s permission. This means that advertisers can be billed for several ad impressions rather than just one. Several of Australia’s major publishers are still using autorefresh.
ABA boss Paul Dovas said: “Media buyers are spending money on display ads that are going unseen on background browser tabs and even unattended computers.”
Next comes double counting, where a publisher puts two or more tracking tags on each page, so their traffic appears to be double.
Placement of a tracking tag at the top of the page rather than the bottom also helps boost numbers as it counts pages whether they are fully loaded or not. The ABA said: “Although this seems like a minor point, this common tactic has been found to boost traffic by as much as 50% on certain sites so it’s important that tag placement is standardised across all sites.”
Another is sites failing to geo-target their ads to Australia – so ads are potentially served to overseas visitors, who are of little use to the advertisers.
Another way of fooling advertisers, says, the ABA, is “misreporting ‘server hits’ as page impressions, leading to vast overcounting”. Mumbrella has previously reported on AdNews – which is unaudited – adopting the metric of “advertising impressions”, multiplying the number of page impressions it serves by the number of ads on the page to multiply its true numbers by around six and simply publicising these as “impressions”.
The ABA warned: “”All of these traps impact the media evaluation process, impeding media buyers’ ability to fairly assess where to place their ad investment and have confidence in the figures being used. These traps also put trustworthy publishers at an unfair disadvantage because they will be competing with inflated or even fabricated figures.”
The ABA has published a “safe list” of audited publishers and sites. There are now more than 200 sites which have been approved by the ABA as avoiding the dodges listed above.
Would love to see Mumbrella name and shame the big sites using these shoddy tactics.
Even better, call them and publish their comments on the issue.
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No news ltd? ninemsn?
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while its good to have a level playing field, it does feel like the ABA are trying to create a league table of sorts and in doing so applying pressure for other publishers to ‘sign up’. Smart planner/buyers/traffickers know who is auto-refreshing and can easily find out who is not geo targeting. Its not like we (online publishers) can print 200,000 impressions then send them off to the pulp machine without distributing them. we cant sell what we dont have! At what point does market position become important? Is it to demonstrate your reach/share to a particular audience?
As an international publsher who has recently launched here, i still dont know whether to invest or not in a local audit, especially as we have an ABCe.
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Hi Sam,
The issue is that some online publishers ARE selling what they don’t have!
e.g. We recently censured a website for serving their homepage as a popunder on an external site. This artifically inflated their traffic and served ads in the background of the browser that may never have been seen by a user. This is just like pulping extra copies because these artifical page impressions are *publisher-generated* and not requested by a real user.
In this scenario, the media-buyers were still paying for the wasted ads & ad serving and their competitors were put at a disadvantage. There are plenty of other cases like that …
The media buyers didn’t know about this and how could they be expected to when there are easily over 1500 local sites to check every month. Also I would dispute how easy (and practical) it is for each buyer to detect auto-refresh, geo-targeting and all the other issues when in a few cases the publishers themselves didn’t realise they were doing it.
The audit process removes the burden and risk from the media buyers, so all they have to do is look for the green tick to know they can trust the figures.
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