ABA warns media buyers about publishers’ uproven claims using Google Analytics data
The Audit Bureaux of Australia (ABA) is warning media buyers not to trust misleading website audience figures that are based on publisher’s unproven claims and internal Google Analytics reports.
This warning to the industry comes from the ABA due to increasing demand from its members to intensify education around this issue and to help protect media buyers from wasting time and ad spend on risky publishers that present misleading figures.
Says Paul Dovas, ABA chief executive: “At a time when accountability should be at the forefront of all advertising decisions, we are still seeing a high number of media buyers accepting publisher’s Google Analytics claims. Media buyers should be wary of this approach because unaudited publisher claims have, time and again, been proven to be untrustworthy because the numbers are so easy to manipulate, either through technical means or by misleading reporting of the figures.”
When used for internal web analytics purposes, Google Analytics is an adequate tool because there is no need for standardisation or compliance to industry rules. However due to measurement implementation errors or publisher’s disregard for industry measurement rules, internal Google Analytics reports do not meet the industry standard required for the purposes of benchmarking and proving online audience size to advertisers.
Dovas continued: “Some publishers choose not to audit because they know they can provide more favourable internal Google Analytics figures which can be manipulated to provide a higher audience number than competitors. It is disturbing to know that media buyers may be taking them at their word and not asking for audited numbers which is a key requirement in other media.”
The most common misuse of Google Analytics reports is when the website misrepresents worldwide audience traffic as Australian traffic enabling the website to gain an unfair advantage over their competitors.
Another tactic is to report the highest month’s audience figures instead of reporting a current month or a rolling average. The most common technical error that occurs is when a website places an additional Google Analytics tracking tag on each page, causing each page view to be counted twice.
There are numerous ways to distort the numbers, which makes it very difficult for media buyers or competitors to detect when this is occurring.
The ABA recently published a digital watchdog report that is essential reading for media buyers which highlights many of the mistakes and tricks that can cause misleading publisher claims.
All of the risks that have been highlighted by the ABA 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.
In order to protect their ad investment, media buyers should seek independent ABA verification of online audience figures.
Of the Australian advertising trade press online sites only Campaign Brief and Mumbrella are IAB audited. AdNews, B&T and Australian Creative have so far declined to be IAB audited.
5 Comments
Gee the TV viewship numbers are so accurate now aren’t they. A tiny sample size, made up of the kind of develop mentally delayed individual that will allow the intrusion and waste of time of having their viewing monitored…..No wonder we’ve ended up with so much rubbish on free to air….
No one saqid anything about TV viewing. Sheeeesh!
What are you so defensive about Mr Google Anal-ytics Man?
Cause advertisers spend based on the stats, so while TV gets a free run based on rubbish viewing figures, it holds back ad revenue for online content. My agenda is seeing advertisers pay more for online space to quality content providers.
Aren’t they saying that digital people have been using misleading figures to drum up business? That sounds like a free run to me. I even heard they were using clicks to sell online space – that’s criminal. I can’t believe anyone would fall for that. Nigerian scams have more credibility.
Anyhow – good luck with selling digital space.
One more thing: how do you get to own digital space in the first place so you can on-sell it??
This is a slightly disingenuous claim from an organisation feeling threatened by Google’s growing status in the analytics space.
There are several free (and independent) online tools to check for measurement implementation errors, i.e., to check that a publisher has installed analytics code correctly and is not doubling up the code.
And if an advertiser is worried that a publisher is showing the highest month’s audience figures, they can simply request to see the last few months of data. It takes seconds to export that data.
There’s less and less call these days for spending ridiculous amounts of money with people like the ABA, and if the ABA wants to reverse that trend, they’ll have to come up with more solid reasoning than this.