Nielsen and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) are back in market with a strengthened measurement offering aimed at giving publishers what they want – more depth and precision.
Launching today, the “major digital upgrade” to Nielsen Digital Content Ratings now includes numbers on ‘off-platform’ as well as expanded measurement coverage of mobile audiences.
The off-platform data capture refers to the extraction of data on publisher content that is viewed outside of owned assets, for example, news.com.au stories that are read via social media platforms.
The new system is designed to deliver the most precise and comprehensive independent view of total digital audiences local to date.
“This is an incredibly competitive market and publishers in Australia are constantly evolving their content delivery strategies to win the hearts of Australian audiences,” says Nielsen Media managing director, Monique Perry.
“Now with the support of IAB and its Measurement Council, we have the sophistication and depth of digital measurement to provide the most complete view of these highly engaged digital audiences.”
Speaking to AdNews, Perry likened the high level of measurement and progression of Australian publishers to the Italian market and the conversations she is having with counterparts there - saying that that specific overseas market was advanced and going through the same digital and publisher and digital metrics growing pains.
Perry also passionately explained how it was vital for them to wait until the offering was just right before launching and explained how she felt deep empathy for publishers who wanted to see such advancements sooner.
“We have a great deal of empathy for the publishers as we know how important having these metrics are to them, so we didn’t want to launch before we had it right,” she says.
Perry says a critical component of Nielsen’s digital measurement is publisher participation as Nielsen’s Software Development Kit (SDK) or tag has to be embedded in publishers’ assets to enable it to record content both on and off-platform.
The SDK acts as a beacon to Nielsen’s third-party data provider to determine who did the viewing, in age and gender terms as well as deduplication of audiences between devices and over time.
The measurement now collects data on people aged 18 and under, something it didn’t do before. Despite this sounding somewhat creepy, collecting data from people aged under 18, acting CEO at IAB Australia, Gai Le Roy, says there should be no cause for concern.
Le Roy added that Australia is the first market globally to introduce a digital audience currency that has broad monthly ratings coverage across both text and video content for on and off-platform to give digital publishers big and small, giving the opportunity to report their complete audience.
“Today’s release is a testament to the commitment from the IAB Measurement Council and the level of local digital industry collaboration to support independent, transparent and high-quality digital measurement,” she says.
Perry adds that today’s milestone did not come easily.
She explains how it is only through the acceptance of the Nielsen SDK integration that it is able to independently measure audiences consuming content off-platform and this cooperation is enabling independent third-party audience verification.
“This was our hardest upgrade to date and has required incredible collaboration from publishers to tag all their content and to test our solutions, as well as off-platform providers to integrate with our measurement solution,” Perry says.
“This industry can be proud of its efforts and in fact, there are more publishers tagged for Nielsen’s digital measurement in Australia than in any other global Nielsen market.”
Nielsen will still deliver independent panel only audience metrics for the many websites that do not integrate the SDK and this will deliver monthly audiences for content consumed on-platform only.
Daily Mail Australia managing director, Peter Holder, told AdNews the “new methodology finally and properly captures our audience – on- and off-platform, and across devices.”
Will it be enough to lure back Fairfax pulled out of the ratings system in March? Perry said only time will tell, but she hopes so.
In a first look at the new data, the Digital Content Ratings monthly numbers are predominantly higher than Digital Ratings (monthly), largely driven by increases in measurement of smartphone audiences. The smartphone audience increases are due to the inclusion of off-platform content, in-app browsing behaviour and measuring under 18-year-olds on smartphone devices.
The chart below excludes Yahoo7 as it is currently going through the SDK onboarding process.
In a nutshell what has changed?
* Market rankings will now come from Digital Content Ratings Monthly tagged data as the independent third-party, IAB endorsed rankings.
* Digital Content Ratings Monthly tagged data delivers the first view of monthly audiences including off-platform, in app browsing and mobile audiences under 18.
* Digital Ratings Monthly has been renamed Nielsen Digital Panel and will be used for the reporting of non-tagged sites in Digital Content Ratings.
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