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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

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.

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
alexx.cass@auditbureau.org.au

Pretty sizeable if 20% of your audience is o/s … millions of ad dollars down the toilet.

You could add Defamer to that list, I was on the site today and noticed it auto refreshed after 15, I think.