Mumbrella traffic audit unveiled
Mumbrella has become the first of Australia’s media and marketing trade press to gain an audit certificate for its online audience.
According to the Audit Bureau of Australia certificate for September, Mumbrella had a 58,555 unique browsers; 293,130 page impressions and 133,385 sessions. The data is viewable via Nielsen Market Intelligence.
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Well done guys – keep up the great work!
Congratulations.
It would also be interesting to see a survey of who reads Mumbrella, broken down by industry and occupation.
Great initiative from the ABA. I’m just wondering if publishers with similar traffic to Tim’s are willing to participate given the cost of entry. At just under $1 cpm it seems a little to rich to play right now.
More useful would be comparing your SiteCensus numbers with your Google Analytics numbers
Nice work Tim, agree with Tony & Jerrys above.
mike – do you really think $1 is expensive. For someone like Tim it’d cost around $273 in that case (based on approx. 273k impressions).
I’d say it’s a pretty small price to pay considering the upside commercially in being able to take figures to market that are maybe a little massaged. Agencies/advertisers don’t really want 10 different potential sources for audience data – they want one so they can make like for like comparisons. I think the audit helps that become achieveable.
I totally agree on the point you make about one source Ben – I’m all for the ABA in that sense. But yes, I do think $1 for every thousand pages served is a high price to pay, especially for start ups looking to play in this space.
Let’s look at some very basic numbers here…
Two ad units per page in any given month might be lucky to generate a $15 page yield. For example – a publisher might sell through the MRec at 50% for a decent rate (say $20cpm), and leaderboard at 30% (for a $10cpm), leaving the remainder destined for the remnant scrap heap where the average eCPM might get as high as $0.50. Using Tim’s traffic as an example (with the obvious value of this audience aside), the 300×250 @ $20CPM ($2,730) and 728×90 @ $10CPM ($819) would generate $3,549. The remnant might bring you in a couple hundred more which brings us to the grand total of $3,750. That leaves us with a $13.74 yield per 1000 pages before costs, which might account for $5, leaving a net yield of $8.74.
Ben, before you come back arguing about the value of an audience and high yielding executions, I get it. I’m just saying that another $1 eroding away at your margin is a huge deal for start ups looking to compete on the web, which is why the ABA set this audit up in the first place… wasn’t it?
We had our site added to the audit last month.
In response to the comments above, two observations:
1. It only includes Australian traffic. This means that mUmbrella’s traffic is actually much higher (more reason to be proud).
2. I’m assuming that the the price set is designed to actually discourage smaller websites (i.e. If you can’t afford it, you shouldn’t be doing it).
I think both of these elements work to the system’s benefit by ensuring Australian data (it’s what most Australian marketers care about) and preventing startups from spending time and effort on something that is probably not going to help much in the early days anyway (when UBs are in the double or triple figures).
Impressive figures. Well done 🙂
Interesting…why not just use Google Analytics? Or I guess they’re giving you more detailed demographics data to help with your ad-sales?
Well done Mumbrella–welcome to the new world of transparent, audited web traffic data!
To those who have questioned using ABA’s numbers and not simply using a measurement tool like Google Analytics, I give you five words: A single set of standards.
GA is fine for internal use by a website owner who wishes to analyze traffic and user tendencies to create a better site. But ABA is now providing exactly what buyers of online media are looking for–website traffic that is audited to a single industry standard for “apples-to-apples” comparisons during pre-buy decision-making. ABA’s process ensures a level playing field of metrics and verification testing so data is reliable and comparable—unlike measurement tools like GA that are implemented by a site solely for self-reporting.
Measurement tools can not offer third-party independence, are not used to a standard across competitive sites and do not provide a single destination for data.
Sorry I’m a bit late to the party but here’s a few clarifications on our ABA Web Audit Service:
Why not Google or unaudited Nielsen data?: Some good comments above explain this but to make it really simple I will ask these questions: When you see a set of GA or Nielsen figures how do you know this site is not double or triple tagging? How do you know this is AU traffic only? Are they rolling up their other unrelated sites into this figure?
If you’ve never thought about that then you are a very trusting person. I can tell you horror stories about what we have been finding and how much this has been impacting the figures. In more cases than not, publishers are undercounting, because they are unaware of exactly what they can count and what their competitors are counting.
This service is not about simply providing web figures, it is about providing audited figures that are rules-compliant and standardised.
How do you know your competitor is tagging their photo slideshow the same way as you? How do you know whether these figures are inflated with auto-page refreshs or non-user requested pop-up content?
Well if it has an ABA green tick it is a number you can trust.
Our rules and info on the audit can be found here: http://www.auditbureau.org.au/.....rvices.php
On price: The CPM average is more like $0.7 and ranges between $1 to $0.15 depending on page impression volume. With any service, unless it’s free it won’t be the perfect price point for everyone. But this rate is significantly lower than ever and many niche sites have signed-up who haven’t been able to before, so in that regard you would have to agree we have successfully lowered the barrier for entry.
One word (two syllables) HitWise
Does anyone trust or use Hitwise data? No one seems to talk about it’s awesomeness.
TRUST and USE have very different meanings. For all the reasons Alexx points out, HITWISE is okay for internal USE to improve your site’s efficiency and user experience, but due to the lack of it being an audited application to a standard, it should not be used as the measurement currency (TRUST) for buying advertising.