Print audit body launches web push
Australia’s print audit organisation has launched its long awaited web auditing service.
The Audit Bureaux of Australia – which covers Australia’s two print auditors the Audit Bureau of Circulation and the Circulations Audit Board – launched the new service at an industry event at the Australian Museum.
The ABA Web Audit Service is being run by Nielsen Online, which places tags from its Market Intelligence system on websites to verify publishers’ traffic claims.
And although the service is being initally aimed at the ABA’s traditional print owners who have launched online ventures, CEO Gordon Towell said there had already been strong interest from online-only publishers.
The service will cover five metrics:
- Unique browsers
- Page impressions
- Sessions
- Frequency
- Duration
And the ABA claims its price structure is such that even smaller site owners would have no excuse not to sign up.
Publishers with less than 150,000 page impressions per month will be charged a fee of $95 per month to use the service, which would see the data included in Nielsen’s Market Intelligence service, and also give them access to the website ranking system data themselves.
Towell said: “We are faced with a need for transparency and accuracy. That’s not to say that everybody is manipulating the numbers, but it would be fair to say there are a number of different ways to interpret them. There’s a strong need to get a interpretation of that data.”
He added: “We think it is very affordable and has taken away any reason for any publisher however small not to participate.”
His comments were backed by Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Paul Fisher who said: “We don’t have a shortage of data – we are swimming in data. But we all need to trade in a common currency.”
During the question and answer session Towell was quizzed why the bureau was only working with Nielsen Online. he said: “We did talk to other potential partners and some simply did not want to work with us. The best example of that was Google – they have a very different view of this discussion and on the industry going forward.”
Potentially the biggest challenge faced by the service in getting smaller publishers on board will be that Google Analytics is a free service.
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Where was the industry consultation on this? Did they work with the IAB, AIMIA or AFA?
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Great idea, build a ladder for the them to climb.
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Hi James,
It did come up at the briefing – certainly the IAB and Media Federation were both represented at the event. The AANA is also mentioned in the ABA’s literature. Not sure about AIMIA or the AFA though. Arguably it’s on the peripherary the AFA’s remit.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
James, the MFA was certainly immersed in this process over the past twelve or so months, representing the needs of both the media agencies and the advertisers. The MFA is also currently heavily involved with the IAB’s Audience Measurement Council striving to bring about a currency for online audience measurement to complement the ABA’s currency for ‘long-tail’ web traffic.
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Does anyone know the difference between this and Google Analytics?
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Hi anon,
As far as I can see, the main difference is that audits with ABA are visible to anyone who subscribes to the service, whereas Google Analytics would have to be shared by an individual site owner with the person who wanted to see it.
I guess if you’re a site that takes regular bookings from media agencies, it may benefit you to have your details readily available to them when they log onto the ABC site. Otherwise they’d have to rung you up for the data which I guess they might not bother with.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Interesting to see Mumbrella’s Google analytics there. You don’t get much weekend traffic, do you?
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Anon, the difference in the data can be summarised by consistency and comparability. Given that the ABA tags will be in the same place for all audited sites means that they are counted on the same basis and are not being ‘gamed’ by placing them at the top of the page etc. Also, all traffic is processed and treated under the same rules, so again the data is consistent. Finally, as Tim points out, all audited sites can be accessed and compared directly via the ABA portal. Finally, I’d like to reinforce that this is TRAFFIC data and not AUDIENCE data.
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Hi Lottie,
Most of our traffic does come in Monday to Friday, which probably reflects the working patterns of the audience. You won’t be surprised to hear that it falls off a cliff on a Friday afternoon! Also, although we do update over the weekend, there tends to be less new content.
However as our archive grows and we creep up the SEO rankings (I notice we recently moved up from a Google PR of 4 to 5) our proportion of search traffic increases, which has seen our background numbers increase at the weekend too.
Cheers,
Tim
Thanks John / Tim… interesting stuff
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Hi all, John Butterworth CEO of AIMIA here, re the comment about consultation with other industry bodies, AIMIA is the parent body for the IAB and a bunch of other industry groups like Mobile Mondays and I sit on the IAB Board so have been well across all this. This is about advertising so AIMIA is happy for the IAB to lead on this.
Have also had separate AIMIA meeting with Gordon Towell of the ABA and Nielsen about the “long tail” (which we prefer to respectfully describe as “the rest of ths industry”) so I reckon the digital industry bodies have well and truly been consulted on this.
While AIMIA has its own views on the competitiveness of the measurement provider market there’s no issue about being consulted.
Cheers
JB
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