OPA Measurement Update – Jan 2010
Introduction:
A year in this position has flown by. A lot has happened in the world of measurement and it is important to deliver a quick update before the OPA AGM this week. Apologies for the long read and please circulate to those in your organization that deal with measurement and technical issues.
Important Announcements!
Nielsen’s pricing for 2010:
This is currently being finalised with a new set of proposed member traffic bands to better reflect the growing and diverse membership base. It will allow people to more easily see how their costs will grow as their traffic grows, and do so in an affordable, scalable manner for all.
We are aware that many members feel that the Nielsen fees are expensive in these tough trading conditions for the media sector. The contract renegotiations have been robust to ensure the mutual interests of our members while ensuring Nielsen are able to offer strong services and support. Importantly, we must all realize that the fees paid offer huge value in our collective ability to attract quality advertising spend to the online medium.
Membership cancellations & the Nielsen 2010 contract
If you do not intend to be part of the OPA during 2010 and pay the required Nielsen fees, please inform Theresa now and remove the Nielsen tags from your website. It makes it very difficult for us as the Nielsen contract takes into account all current members, assuming their participation for the next year.
Nielsen V6 tags – get them in!
We strongly recommend that everyone replaces the tags (tracking code) on their web and mobile sites with the new V6 tags. They are smaller and more efficient, and offer more options for sophisticated users. Please contact Nielsen on careza@nielsen.com for technical documentation and assistance on how to proceed, and get your development teams to work. Why not take the opportunity to do a tag audit on your site, and get the New Year off to a good start!!?
Portfolio Updates
New Market Intelligence demographics survey - done!
As mentioned in July, we needed to revise, approve and implement a new demographics survey questionnaire before the end of 2009. This was vital to create a new set of data for 2010 that enabled better online media planning and buying. The new survey is a little longer, but far better segmented with more relevant questions. Much time was spent ensuring as much consistency with AMPS as possible, while of course catering to a digital audience.
I’d like to thank all those that submitted comments to the blog suggesting questions and specifically to Jawwaad Akleker from BDFM’s Business Intelligence unit for his time and insights into the comparisons with the AMPS survey. Nielsen was also very supportive in this, and gave us resources and advice.
The new survey will be live next week.
New site ranking categories & clean-up - done!
As promised, we expanded and refined the categories into which websites can be placed for rankings. The new categories will be implemented in February. There will no doubt be some of you who feel there should be an additional category or that you’re in the wrong place. Suggestions can be sent to Theresa for new categories, although the new categories will remain as they are for another year before revision. Members have until Feb 28th to request changes to the categorization of their sites.
A huge thanks to Colin and Theresa here, as they painstakingly went through every site and proposed where it should go within the new system. A huge task, and one we should all be grateful to them for doing on our behalf. Please do justice to this work by looking at your own sites and raising any issues with your categorization within the rankings as soon as possible with Theresa.
The Rankings are looking a lot cleaner since a year ago. This is largely due to the effort of each member to get their affairs in order and to the Nielsen team for actively pursuing this. If you see brand duplication or confusion in the rankings, please let Theresa know. As mentioned, our collective ability to attract quality spend depends on a clear ranking system.
New Metric: Average Daily Unique Browsers
We introduced this new ranking metric in October, in line with Nielsen’s other markets. It is considered a more accurate reflection of unique browser activity than the monthly metric as it avoids some problems that can be caused by cookies. Nielsen are increasingly releasing the monthly site ranking figures based on the daily average and not the monthly total for unique browsers.
The new exco will decide whether to send out the monthly rankings based on this metric after the AGM, now that people have got used to it and publishers and advertisers have had an opportunity to understand it clearly.
Nielsen vs Google Analytics Survey – done! (but inconclusive)
First, a huge thanks to those that submitted data (almost 50 sites participated). Unfortunately, (and not for lack of trying!) there were too many data inconsistencies in what was available. As a result we were unable come up with any patterns that one could positively identify as a trend to explain why some sites have very big differences between the reported figures from the two systems.
The data did reveal that almost everyone has had periods of relatively large differences in their Google and Nielsen data, and that it is not contained to a particular publisher, content or advertising platform, or approach. Encouragingly, the biggest gaps shrunk or are shrinking. Sites that had large discrepancies in 2008 were much closer in 2009. It is clear they have made efforts to ensure they are tagging the same way for both tools.
Perhaps the biggest take-home is that by using an additional analytics tool, you have a point of comparison for trends and can more easily identify tags that may be incorrect or missing. You can then act on it!
We hope to put in place a technical sub-committee on Measurement for 2010 that will look for trends to help members understand the different measuring tools and provide technical tips through the sharing of collective experience and knowledge.
That said, we did get some nice information about member measurement activities:
44% of those that participated had customized their Google Analytics dashboard. This demonstrates an active interest in getting unique measurement insights.
Only 32% used Nielsen’s content groups (channels) to group and segment their traffic reports in SiteCensus. This was expected, but provides great room for improvement for members to understand different areas of their sites better.
57% use an additional or alternative analytics tool to those from Google and Nielsen.
When asked whose statistics they trusted the most, 42% said Nielsen, 38% said Google and 10% said their “other/alternative” statistics tool.
75% of the sites had never done a tag audit. This is the biggest issue for us, as regular tag audits are essential if you want to ensure all your traffic is being monitored by Nielsen.
Events
I-COM Global Summit, Lisbon 2010
The OPA is a partner organization to I-COM, a global body and conference of the measurement community. Their next summit takes place from 10 - 13 March 2010, in Lisbon, Portugal. Past I-COM themes focused on connecting the silos, whether they be countries (Berlin ‘05) or media channels (Barcelona ‘08). Building on these ideas, top speakers like Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer will also connect the silos of Measurement Disciplines (Audience Measurement, Web Analytics, Consumer Insights, etc) and debate the future, vision and integration of Online Measurement. Click here to see the programme status.
Join the people already connected with us on the I-COM Global Summit event page.
Sounding off!
Wishing you all success in online publishing in 2010! I really enjoyed being an active part of the OPA this past year and am excited about the future of the organization and the sector in South Africa.
Josh Adler CEO,Prefix/OPA Head of Measurement