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.
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.
No news ltd? ninemsn?
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.
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.