Data analysis drought limits digital ads

A lack of meaningful data analysis is holding back digital advertising in Australia, say some of Australia’s leading digital publishers. Speaking at the 7th Future of Digital Advertising, presented by AIMIA and the IAB, Fairfax Digital’s managing director Pippa Leary said that while publishers like Fairfax were gathering huge amounts of user data, accessing and analysing it is a challenge.

“You have to make an investment in data, in warehouses, in analysis and in people who can take that data and make it meaningful for marketers,” she said. “And those people are extremely hard to come by.”

Her comments were prompted by an audience question about why highly targeted, personalised and engaging advertising is always predicted as the future of online advertising, but rarely seen in practice. Also on the panel was Sensis Mediasmart’s Mark Shaw, who referred to a geo-targeted campaign Sensis created for Westpac using 50 separate versions of an online ad for different postcodes. He said that the publishing capabilities were there but even the simplest targeting requires a complex back-end. Linkedin’s Cliff Rosenberg added that while publishers like Fairfax Digital may have a large amount of user data, there is no need for users to be accurate when handing over the data (unlike, for example, Linkedin, where there is every benefit for being truthful) – which means that building a campaign on rich data can be tricky.

Leary also defended Fairfax Digital’s controversial practice of auto-refreshing, saying that the home pages of news sites like smh.com.au and TheAge.com.au were only auto-refreshed so the most recent content was displayed. She also said that long articles were often split over multiple pages not to increase pageviews but as a result of preferences expressed during user testing. Fairfax Digital is shifting its focus from pure reach to engagement, she said, using a specific formula (page impressions x page duration / unique browsers) to generate a metric for engagement.

Opening the presentations was IAB CEO Paul Fisher who said that the growth of online advertising last year, while other channels shrank, was “the most significant shift in this industry in decades.” Online advertising now accounts for approximately 16 to 17 percent of media spend, with an expected growth of $300 million this year.