How is it possible that we are still seeing some massive media organisations like Fairfax, ACP and Real Estate using auto-refresh? I mean seriously, how low down and dirty can you go for more page impressions? Actually, you can go a lot lower, but I’ll save that for a later Cheap Traffic Grab.
It’s easy to look at this issue and assume it’s no big deal. But consider this perspective (based on some assumptions that may not be 100% accurate), but go with it. If you look at smh as an example (I chose them because they are the highest profile offender with the most traffic I’m aware of). If smh is your homepage, which it is for many people, and your browser sits open for an 8 hour workday, the page will have auto-refreshed 96 times!
Let’s assume for arguments sake that 2.5% of the 115M+ pages on smh homepage each month are generated by auto-refresh. That’s 2.87M un-seen page impressions. If there are 10 ads on the smh homepage as an average, and let’s say that they are getting $10 ecpm for each, that’s $287,500 of advertisers dollars poured down the drain every month! $3.45M a year just from one publisher! Not such a small issue now is it!
I’m sure Fairfax would say that it’s only a tiny % of their page impressions. Well if that’s the case, why bother?
Is it really any wonder that CPM’s are dropping and advertisers are under-valuing display advertising when this kind of activity still exists?
My other problem with this practice is that in an ultra competitive media environment, page impressions are still a key metric used to influence where and how much is spent with publishers. Auto-refresh, even if the % difference it makes is small, gives those publishers an unfair advantage. We’re not comparing horses to horses.
Digital media touts itself as progressive, dynamic, fast paced and measurable yet we have blatant method of cooking the figures like this being used widely and everyone just pretends it doesn’t exist.
In order to extract more dollars from competing media, digital needs a clean, trusted record. According to Alexx Cass, the ABA’s Digital WatchDog committee will be locking down the guidelines for auto-refresh in the next couple of months. Hopefully this should see the practice eradicated once and for all.
I’ve put together a little list of sites I know with auto-refresh. It’s by no means comprehensive. If you know of others please add them in the comments below:
SMH homepage – auto refresh of 5mins
Sportal – auto refresh of 6mins
IT Wire – auto refresh of 15mins, all pages
Lifehacker – auto refresh of 15mins, all pages
Weatherzone – auto refresh of 10mins
Gizmodo – auto refresh of 15mins, all pages
Zoo weekly – auto refresh of 15mins
RSVP – auto refresh of 60mins
Essential Baby – auto refresh of 5mins
Business Spectator – auto refresh of 4mins
Real Estate.com.au – auto refresh of 5mins
Kotaku – auto refresh of 15mins, all pages
9 Comments
Julian Cole 15 September 2009, 7:02pm
Once again you come up with a cracking post.
You could add Defamer to that list, I was on the site today and noticed it auto refreshed after 15, I think.
Neil Ackland 16 September 2009, 11:51am
Cheers Julian!
Anon guy 16 September 2009, 1:33pm
Maybe for the next topic, investigate suppliers that serve AU ads to o/s eyeballs ... and the wastage that creates.
Pretty sizeable if 20% of your audience is o/s ... millions of ad dollars down the toilet.
Alexx Cass 16 September 2009, 2:31pm
Another great post Neil!
Almost every publisher I have met with in the last few months has echoed your thoughts and have flagged auto-page inflation as a key issue impacting the veracity of the current figures in the market.
We’re glad to have you on our ABA Digital Watchdog committee (which is open to any publisher who is ABA-audited for measurement rules compliance).
Some of you may have noticed the green audit ticks starting to appear within Nielsen MI on sites such as CBS, Haymarket, IDG etc. None of these sites use auto-refresh and have passed the audit, so an ABA tick means that site has numbers you can trust.
From a pure audit perspective, the key issue with auto-refreshed pages is that they are not user-requested and therefore shouldn’t technically be counted.
We need to set rules for interstitial pages as well because these aren’t user-requested either but are currently being tagged & included in the PI count by many publishers.
A historical justification to include non user-requested content is that page impressions are being used across the industry as a metric to represent ad inventory (e.g. in Nielsen AdRelevance). If it is only a minority of pages refreshing, then this benefit doesn’t really outweigh the other issues.
Our rules are driven by publisher and agency needs so I look forward to hearing more opinions on this (from both sides).
Alexx Cass
Audit Bureaux of Australia
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Neil Ackland 16 September 2009, 3:01pm
Good point Anon guy.
From our own perspective, we get around 9% of our page traffic from OS and there are occasions where ads are served to OS visitors like buy-outs and sponsorships. We counter balance this issue by having an over-delivery policy so any wastage on OS eyeballs is corrected.
Not sure how common it is within the industry that AU ads are being seen by OS eyeballs generally.
Neil Ackland 16 September 2009, 3:06pm
Thanks Alexx. Looking forward to the Watchdog Committee meeting in a few weeks time and to completing our own audit so we can get the ABA tick of approval.
matt 17 September 2009, 3:45am
All News Digital news sites = five minutes
All Fairfax Digital news sites = five minutes
ninemsn home page = 14 minutes
Rhys Williams 23 September 2009, 11:24am
Great post Neil, this is a massive issue that needs to be aired, for the good of the online industry. If online is ever going to gain more share of the marketing spend then we need to stop these dirty tricks and get the trust of the buyers and marketers.
We all want the same thing - to grow our revenues and run successful sites.
The other metric that is pumped up by the autorefresh is the Average Session Duration (ASD).
Does anyone really believe that people, on average, spend 18minutes on the weatherzone site?(source: Nielsen MI, Sep 09) Seriously, how long does it actually take to check the weather? Don’t get me wrong, its a good site with a strong audience, however I believe its probably opened up in the morning and left in a browser tab, and is auto refreshing every 10mins throughout the day. The session clock is reset every time the page reloads, regardless whether anyone is looking at it or not.
This is important when publishers start using the ASD metric as a sign of user engagement - ie: a large ASD would indicate that people are staying on your site for a long time, and you have a sticky site - when in fact the site is sitting in another browser and auto refreshing in the background.
As Neil says above, if it is truly no big deal, and auto refreshed pages (or “publisher initiated impressions”) is just a small % of the impressions, then why have it all? I would bet if it was removed you would see a significant drop in page impressions and session times across some sites.
And good to see the ABA is taking this issue seriously.
vogue.com.au is another one I have noticed - refresh of 4-5 minutes, depending on page
Auto-refresh debate goes up a gear « Sound A 17 December 2009, 1:22pm
[...] in September I wrote a blog post about Auto-Refresh, a widespread practice used by publishers like Fairfax and ACP to distort their traffic figures. [...]