Online Journalism News

The ABCe: who's auditing the auditors?

"Do we need to continue to evolve the standards and keep updating? Absolutely," Richard Foan, managing director of the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe), told an industry gathering today.

Speaking about the future of web measurement for the publishing industry, Foan said developing metrics for engagement was a key target.

"Time spent is a metric we are working on right now," he said, adding that basic levels of engagement can be calculated from existing data by dividing page impressions generated by the number of unique users to site over the same period.

But there's more to come on this front, he told Journalism.co.uk, which should please an advertising industry increasingly keen for more detailed statistics about online use.

Foan aims to ensure, however, that any existing and future metrics endorsed by the ABCe remain transparent and are well understood by the industry.

The term 'hits' for traffic figures, for example, is 'totally meaningless', according to Foan, and can lead to publishers both overstating and understating actual site traffic.

Educating publishers about the differences between research and sample-based metrics, which give information about who site users are; and counting and census methods, which the ABCe employs, will aid this necessary transparency, Foan told the forum.

"They [publishers] are measuring what they think is the same thing, but it is different metrics coming up with different numbers."

Understanding how the ABCe collates its data and what it does and does not cover will help the bureau's relationship with the industry it audits.

This relationship was thoroughly tested earlier this year by claims from other publishers that Telegraph.co.uk had raised its figures by changing its 'data collecting tools', after the site took the number one spot in March's ABCes with 17,036,081 unique users – a 38.69 per cent month-on-month rise at the time.

"ABCe is about testing overstatement of claims. What we are not testing for is 'under claims', because it depends how well that business is run as to whether they are really claiming all the traffic that they can," he said.

News events that month, the length of the month, and issues with tagging on the Telegraph site were all contributing factors to the traffic surge, Foan suggested – it was not just a case of the site changing how it collects its figures.

Having gone through these elements with the digital heads from the other ABCe audited newspaper titles, all parties are now satisified with the bureau's role, he said, allowing the organisation to push forward with the industry's backing.

"When the industry chooses to have self-regulation with people who really mean it, it can work."

These lessons will be applied as the bureau helps to develop a common standard for measuring mobile traffic to publishers' websites – something it is actively working on with the GMSA and which, if the mobile publishing sector lives up to the hype, will be eagerly anticipated by advertisers and content producers alike.

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