App Measurement Now Available to IAB Members

Johannesburg, South Africa: Effective Measure and IAB South Africa are pleased to announce a new application measurement service that will enable IAB members to track the traffic to, and usage of their apps. This development reflects the industry body’s commitment to digital innovation.

Effective Measure provides web and mobile traffic data and audience profiles for all IAB Publisher member sites as part of a long-standing partnership with IAB SA.  Adding app measurement to the dashboard is the next step in a process that aims to achieve a single point of measurement for IAB members that incorporates rich data about how their website and app content is accessed and consumed.

“We are excited to make app measurement available to our members as we are continually striving to advance industry measurement standards,” says Ryan Harris, Head of Measurement for the IAB SA, “It’s important that we provide our members with accurate measurement tools that are transparent, and help build trust within the market.”

App stores commonly measure apps in number of downloads, but these metrics are pointless to Publishers who want to know the facts about how the app is used after downloading.  The Effective Measure app measurement tool will track both Unique Browsers and Page Impressions, providing real insights into what content draws attention, how it is used and whether or not it is ‘sticky’.

AutoTrader became the first IAB member Publisher to have its app measured using the new service as the project’s pilot study. With more than 1.7 million Unique Browsers per month, and existing Android and iOS apps – AutoTrader was a great publisher to partner with to test this app measurement service. Effective Measure has been working on this pilot study with AutoTrader since July 2014, with final integration of the market ready software development kits (SDKs) being completed last month. August figures show that AutoTrader has over 50,960 unique devices with their app installed.

George Mienie, AutoTrader CEO says, “As the leading automotive digital business in South Africa, we are always looking to innovate. We were excited at the prospect of working with Effective Measure and being the first in South Africa to test app measurement on this platform.”

Effective Measure asked AutoTrader about the experience and how it can be improved, this is what they had to add:

EM: What was the implementation process?

AT: Implementation was quite tricky. But given our tech team – who we consider to be some of the best in the world – we were confident they could pull it off and they did. The entire process took about a week to implement. Like any implementation it followed the normal process from scope to action and test. The challenge was that there was no existing documentation/FAQ to assist (as this was a first run) and we had to rely on constant communication with the team from Effective Measure – who were very helpful.

EM: How quickly was the data consumed into the dashboard and how did it measure up with other tools?

AT: It appeared in our dashboard within 48hrs of implementation. Like any of these tools there are slight differences which is what we have experienced, and we still continue to monitor and measure.  In terms of data, we tracked this weekly during the test period and our app traffic has grown to over 50,960 Unique Browsers across Android and iOS in the past few months. (August 2015).

Nicolle Harding, Country Manager for Effective Measure says,” It is great that Effective Measure is innovating in this space. Allowing marketers to access measurement figures for applications in the EM dashboard, is the first step to ensuring we give the market a representative offering. Mobile is a major part of the South Africa ecosystem, this product release recognises that.”

Measuring an app beyond the point of it being downloaded will enable Publishers to achieve a far greater understanding of how consumers actually use it.  This is the precise knowledge that is needed to enhance the content and usability of the app to more effectively build an engaged and highly valued brand community.

APP MEASUREMENT
The EM App SDK for iOS and Android is designed to provide an easy way for application developers to enable measurement and reporting in Effective Measure’s dashboard.

TRAFFIC COLLECTION
Traffic collection is done in real time via HTTP to Effective Measure’s collection servers.  No buffering of data is performed by the SDK and a persistent connection to the Internet is required for reliable data collection.

IMPLEMENTATION
Once the tag is implemented, using these resources for iOS and Android, the technical support team will work with you to ensure correct reporting and attribution of application traffic.

APP METHODOLOGY
Measuring your App is similar to that of a standard webpage.  Every App screen load is approximated as a Page View, where the load is user generated and most of the screen is updated.  The EM beacon is required to fire on each Page View to ensure accurate app metrics.

The Unique Browsers (UB) metric, is also known as a “Unique Device” within other App analytics packages.  This is essentially the same thing, an Audience Measurement metric to approximate people/eyeballs.

DASHBOARD
The traffic from the SDK will be reported in the Effective Measure audience planning dashboard.  This data can be viewed by using the keyword “App” in the dashboard search window.

Audience measurement metrics collected are:

–               Unique Browsers (Unique Device)

–               Daily Average UBs

–               Visits

–               Page Views (PV)

–               Average Page Duration (APD)

–               Average Visit Duration (AVD)

–               Average Page Views (APV)

Please note: No demographic profiling of App data is currently available.

More information, including implementation details can be found on the Effective Measure App Page

For interviews with Effective Measure please contact Nicolle Harding on nicolle.harding@effectivemeasure.com or IAB SA please contact Gia Costella at Lion’s Wing on gia@lionswing.co.za

 

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