According to the ABA, realestate.com.au is the only top 10 online publisher(1) to have been audited to have received the green tick of approval, ensuring it’s leading the way within the industry.
The decision to be audited was taken by realestate.com.au recognising the growing need for online publishers to provide better accountability to media buyers and advertisers.
Greg Ellis, CEO of the REA Group which owns realestate.com.au, said the company had made a conscious decision to upgrade the site earlier this year, to make it more consumer and advertiser friendly.
“In April we embarked on an exciting journey which included the new-look realestate.com.au for consumers, which has made the site even more popular than ever. In fact last month the site achieved record traffic attracting 6.9 million unique browsers(2) to the site,” he said.
“As well as benefits to consumers, we also identified the need to standardise the way we display advertising and moved to best practice in measurement and performance. This includes the removal of the ‘auto-refresh’ functionality and moving to standardised Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) display units,” he said.
Removal of ‘auto refresh’ means advertisers only pay for user-generated page impressions, significantly decreasing the likelihood of page impression numbers being inflated. With auto refresh removed, media buyers and advertisers can plan campaigns with confidence on realestate.com.au knowing that they are buying real impressions, not inflated impressions.
The green tick of approval by the ABA is independent recognition of the improvements made to realestate.com.au’s site, ensuring performance measures are not only accurate, but also that the site conforms to industry best practice.
The decision for realestate.com.au to be audited was welcomed by leading industry expert Paul Elliott, Head of Digital from OMD.
“We’re beginning to implement policies to give preferential consideration to those publishers who provide complete transparency, so we encourage all publishers to be audited by the ABA,” said Paul.
“We’re glad to see more publishers embracing the audit process and becoming rules-compliant. OMD fully supports the efforts of the ABA in the drive to provide agencies with numbers we can trust,” he said.
This green tick is easily recognised when viewing standard Nielsen online rankings through Market Intelligence.