The problem is bigger than you think

You may hear that auto-refreshing pages is not a problem, "what's an extra 10% or 20% here or there ... media-buyers discount for that anyway, so it all comes out in the wash." The reality however is that impact of auto-refresh inflation on audience figures is severe. The addition of this simple line of code can double page impressions and more than quadruple session duration.

It's possible that the impact of auto-refreshing was relatively minor when it was first introduced, but the online landscape has changed significantly since then. Given the take-up of multi-tabbed and always-on web browsers, it's important for the industry to understand the full impact on market metrics when publishers count a web page constantly refreshing in the background, regardless of whether it's being viewed by human eyes or not.

The smoking gun

To understand the true before-and-after effect of auto-refresh inflation I analysed the traffic changes to two ad-supported websites that have previously experimented with auto-refreshing every 15 minutes and then have subsequently removed the auto-refresh code from their pages. This analysis uses 2008-9 data available to the market from Nielsen Online Market Intelligence. As you can see below, the impact is enormous, with page impressions essentially doubling and session duration being so vastly inflated to the point of being unusable as a meaningful metric.

Protect Yourself

Media-buyers in particular should be aware of the risks associated with buying on unaudited web audience figures, in particular from sites that employ auto-refreshing. The Audit Bureaux of Australia (ABA) and Media Federation of Australia (MFA) have been closely working together to protect their agency members and ensure they can easily identify websites that have passed the ABA measurement rules audit with a green tick. An ABA green tick is your assurance that your advertising investment has a greater chance of reaching eyeballs.

Publishers can demonstrate their commitment an open and transparent relationship with their advertiser clients by ensuring that they are compliant with all industry-agreed web audience measurement rules. Don't let these issues such as double-tagging, undercounting and flawed rich media measurement catch you by surprise; quite often your web developer implementing the tracking tag isn't aware of the industry-agreed measurement rules.

No leg to stand on

In addition to the empirical evidence above proving extreme auto-refresh inflation, it's important to note that there is also very little international support for the practise of including auto-refreshed traffic in web audience measurements so any publisher engaging in this practise is putting themselves at odds with the global online advertising community. Following is a collection of various industry standpoints on auto-refreshing:

1. In the US, the IAB's Audience Measurement rules do not allow the measurement of auto-refreshed pages on normal websites (but gives some leeway for rich media applications).

"only those pages in which user interaction occurs can contribute to calculations of Time Spent, or to counts of additional impressions beyond the first measured impression." http://www.iab.net/media/file/Audience_Reach_Guidelines.pdf

2. The ABA Digital Watchdog committee (which includes the MFA and audited publishers) unanimously outlawed the practise of including auto-refreshed traffic in market metrics. Publishers using this practise are non-compliant with the ABA measurement rules and will therefore fail the audit: http://www.auditbureau.org.au/breaking_news.php#oct0909

3. Expect more attention on this issue from the MFA in the coming months in addition to the letter they have sent to their members encouraging them to demand audited figures. http://www.auditbureau.org.au/breaking_news.php#dec1609

4. This practice does not comply with the W3C Accessibility Guidelines: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20081211/G76 because it discriminates towards people with vision impairments.

"let the user control if and when content is updated, in order to avoid confusion or disorientation caused by automatic refreshes that cause a change of context"

5. There is very little public support either, according to a recent local CBS Interactive survey, only 9% of respondents thought it was acceptable for publishers to use auto-refresh: http://www.cbsinteractive.com.au/survey/thanks.htm?id=4

Publishers can take immediate action to correct it and reaffirm their commitment to their advertiser clients; simply remove your tags from auto-refreshing pages before your advertisers revert to other F words to describe what they are buying. Remember, you can still refresh your pages; just exclude them from your market metrics so that they are not inflated.

Follow the ABA Watchdog on Twitter for important reports and industry rules updates: twitter.com/abawatchdog

When a website owner believes they can make X amount of dollars because they have X amount of users what analysis has gone into their numbers? I would suggest that sometimes it is solely a number of unique users or total visitors without any real analysis of who their users are. This is not necessarily the fault of the website owner because as an industry we have striven to grow - our users, our revenue, our share. But sometimes it is worth looking a bit deeper and justifying our position. Yet I often see publishers simplifying the level of inquiry they make into who their users are. Examples of this include fewers steps to registration, and less or no user surveys. These same publishers are often providing free content and applications yet believing that they should do as little as possible to interrupt site visitors in the fear they won't return. As a result we know very little about them!

Acting in a similar behaviour, ad networks have chased an ever larger portfolio of websites to grow their revenue further, but then struggled to understand what their portfolio of websites offer. It is understandable that at some point the network becomes too large for the sales team to truly have a solid knowledge of all clients and know the nuances of all the audiences that they reach. It is at this point that there is a lost opportunity - for the publishers, the advertisers, the users and ultimately the sales houses themselves.

And finally, in regards to media agencies, we have a situation where they are under increasing pressure to produce the highest return at the lowest rates. In some scenarios this means negotiating ever lower fees from their suppliers, the ad networks and publishers, trying to drive a higher click-through percent with millions of ad impressions on large volumes of sites ... yet more numbers.

The point of this article is not too say we should drop the strengths our industry has in measuring data, what it is saying is we should try harder to understand the numbers further. If I have 100,000 users, who are they? What are they interested in? What brands do they use? What frustrates them as much as what empowers them? This is something all publishers, sales teams, agencies and advertisers should be trying to answer whilst trying to hit their number - whatever that number may be. Just because we have 1000 friends does not make us popular if we have no idea who they are.

Simple and playable web games work very effectively. Use your brand mascot as a game character or select a game theme that ties closely with your brand, and you can involve kids with your brand in an environment that they enjoy and share with their friends. But don't forget mum and dad. Parents need to be comfortable with the topic of your game and to endorse the play. They are an important part of the marketing cycle.

Below are some key tips to ensure a responsible approach to producing websites for kids:

• Identify yourself: make your brand very clear on the site.

• Make sure the difference is clear between website content and advertising.

• State clearly in your privacy policy that any information collected from children willnotbe sold to a third party, and ensure the policy is written in language that kids can understand.

• Avoid including chat rooms on your site unless you're prepared to appropriately monitor them with qualified and trained staff.

• Require parental consent to be obtained before any child under 13 releases any personal information. The consent should include a request for a parent's email address and sending a notification email to the parent requiring their authorisation.

• Don't display any personal information on the website other than screen names, and avoid too much personalisation within your email communication.

• Only email newsletters and notifications that are in line with your policy, and do not send too many promotional emails.

If you take the steps above and include some eye-catching graphics, playable web games and allow kids to unleash their creativity, you are bound to achieve success in building a following. Last tip: Make sure you keep adding new and exciting content regularly if you want to keep kids coming back!

In our brilliant small world here at Digital Ministry, we have been harping on about self created media for a while now. Braded Utility was the last term being pushed around referring to websites that focused on providing a utility firstly, and branding secondly. An airline company building a free office holiday booking engine, Special K offering a jogging service online, a car manufacturer that provides real time traffic info etc... It’s simply about brands giving something back by actually being useful and practical, not just saying they are.

The underlying success in both apps and branded utility is interaction. Consumers have never being easier to target or contact, but never harder to actually impact in a meaningful way. If you’ve managed to get your customers attention today you can’t afford to waste it. Apps, I only refer to the good ones here, offer this in spades. They get people to spend their time with your brand, and offer a positive brand experience at no media cost. Why would people do that? Because they think that what you’re offering is appealing, useful, relevant and/or entertaining service.

Mobile phones have done similar things before the iPhone was heard of, I hear you say. This is true to an extent. Mobile has offered for some years now access to the web, an inbuilt wallet, GPS functionality, 95% open rates on SMS and MMS but a small screen in most cases, and no apps has held it back.

What the iPhones offer is more of the above, for example access to the web is a simpler, seamless experience, none of yer WAP type clunky sites. As a result 88% of iPhone owners are regular web users compared to 20% for non iphone users. However in addition to typical Mobile phones, iPhones also offer the following.

1. Multi-Touch, intuitive interface

2. Much larger screen that lets websites look like websites

3. Bigger memory than most - 4GB Memory

4. The accelerometer – the phone knows how you are moving in all 3 dimensions

5. Real-time 3D graphics

6. 3D positional audio

7. Direct link to iTunes, which I am sure will soon change to iSelleverything

8. Compass latest version only.

So the good news is that the technology and platforms are in place and apps are a massive opportunity. The bad news is if we look at apps as possible vehicles for a bit of branded utility we need to start putting a sprint on.

Be very aware that’s it’s a land grab already and to compete brands need to act like software companies fast. Marketing companies are still looking at apps as a short term campaign based apps while development companies are stealing the march on the real valuable realestate and audiences. They have seized first mover advantage and are now constantly renewing the service so it’s always up to date. In some cases they will cut slower companies out in the future.

The business models for this type of approach are software-like business models too, as the cost of developing one of these tools is relatively low, and their spread can be driven cheaply, by word of mouth and virally. But their potential value is huge, so the incentive is there as the pioneering developers are expecting to share in the ultimate success of any app initiative though some form of license.

A good example of already stealing the march is three high volume apps - Stanza, Red Laser and Shazam

Stanza: As a member of the Generation X, I thought the idea of reading on the small screen as just too much of a leap. We have been pursuing as a result of book size ‘electronic readers’, and talking about pliable plastic paper. Amazon has now launched Kindle to much aplomb regardless of the small issue of a price tag of $299. Then along comes stanza, a book reader for the iphone, that grabs free titles from public domains. Stanza has soared in popularity making it overnight a worthy competitor to Amazon's Kindle and has land grabbed the majority share of this market. One key element of this success is the fact that’s its FREE and there are lots of free books. But there is also a shop area for latest releases once it dominates the audience. Whats Amazons reaction? It was simply to copy it and launch Kindle iPhone app.

Red Lazer: What if your iPhone could read barcodes? The RedLaser app lets you search for online prices using Google product search. You can also keep a list of products and send them to yourself or a friend (because sometimes you may need to check things out on a bigger screen.) This is the ultimate comparison site, in the making. So while we are all talking about how much money the comparison sites are spending for market share, you have Red Lazer creating a complete new category.

Shazam: Its being around for a while on mobile, but the iphone is making it universal. Everyone's familiar with this scenario, you hear a really catchy, unfamiliar song on the radio and you have no idea what it's called. You hum it to yourself repeatedly and attempt to memorize the lyrics, only to forget it after slamming a few shots at the bar. Shazam will never leave you struggling to recollect these thoughts again: Hold the iPhone up to a speaker playing the unknown tune and the app will identify it - album, artist and song title. Then of course you can buy it on iTunes and download it to your phone.

So the advice I give is to think out your market and get going on an iPhone app. Other manufacturers stores OVI, blackberry, Samsung are slowly catching on here but a giood app should work across all rich phones. Nokia are even offering subsidized terms to get you to develop an app version for their phones as they recognise that they are a looooooooooooooooog way back. The Open Handset Alliance (OHA) is a business alliance of 50 firms including Google, HTC, Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung, LG, T-Mobile, Nvidia, and Wind River Systems to develop open standards for mobile devices so this should only expand the potential to empower your consumer in unprecedented and transformative ways.

Companies are waking up to the power of apps and recognizing the first mover advantage. Recently JC Decaux , threatened to sue an app developer in Dublin because they had the cheek to offer a service that promoted JC Decaux urban bike scheme. The app allowed you to find out where the bikes terminals were scattered around the city, availability at those terminals and availability at the terminals you wish to travel to. Brilliant for J C Decaux as the scheme has just started you would think. No, said JCD, we need to own that media, if you don’t cease and desist we will sue your ass.

One word of caution before you launch your app, don’t expect users to just take it up because it’s free. Flurry studied user retention across 19 categories over a 90-day period. They monitored if consumers returned to use a downloaded application within 30, 60 and 90-day periods, as well as how frequently consumers used applications over those time periods. Flurry measures user retention by the number of users who downloaded an application, at any time in the past, and used that app within the last seven days. Bottom line is consumers will use you if there is value to them in using you.

So if we accept that a central role of advertising is now to invite interaction, the iPhone offers tools that give brands more to say. Advertising becomes less about screaming ‘Buy me!’ and more about finding out how to be useful. As people start to use the service or application, the brand has a direct channel to that person, and a real opportunity for a permission-based dialogue.