Supplementary written evidence submitted by the Internet Advertising Bureau UK

Please find enclosed some additional information following my appearance at the Committee’s evidence session on 16 January, in response to members’ questions and requests for further information.

1.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       A factsheet on UKOM, the online industry measurement body.
    
2.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       A chart illustrating the proportion of digital advertising that is bought indirectly.
    
3.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       A video explanation of display advertising trading – this is available on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/efHVOWcNJZo

If I can be of any further assistance, please get in touch.

Tim Elkington, Chief Digital Officer, IAB UK

February 2018

UKOM Factsheet

• UKOM (UK Online Measurement) is the industry body set up to identify, define and govern a common UK industry standard for online audience measurement.[1]
• Its purpose is to provide reliable audience data for advertisers and agencies to use to plan and buy media, and to use when evaluating campaign performance, in the same way that BARB and RAJAR provide audience data for TV and radio respectively.
• UKOM measures media audience (i.e. where people are spending time, and how long) online – it does not measure advertising effectiveness or other metrics.

What data UKOM provides

• UKOM provides independently-verified audience demographic data[2], both browser and in-app, for web (desktop/laptop) and mobile (smartphone/tablet).
• Data is collected from the online activity of a demographically-representative panel of users and from visitors to ‘tagged’ media properties. This is used to produce reconciled data for unique visitors – i.e. the number of visits to a site from distinct individuals – and total page views (which includes repeat visits).
• Data is available at the site/app level and, if the audience size is sufficiently large, for sections of a site/app (e.g. the ‘sport’ section of a news site). Data is released monthly.
• Advertising companies subscribe to UKOM data. UKOM also publishers quarterly Digital Market Overviews that are freely available: http://www.ukom.uk.net/data-and-insights/market-overview/ and regular ‘Insights’, providing data, analysis and commentary on the behaviour of the UK’s online population: http://www.ukom.uk.net/data-and-insights/latest-insights/

How UKOM audience measurement works

• UKOM uses a combination of a people panel and ‘tagged’ media.
• In the case of the people panel a piece of software is downloaded to the device and works as a ‘meter’, tracking sites visited and reporting engagement and duration metrics. The benefits of people meters (also used in other media measurement – television, radio, print etc.) is that they deliver demographic information as well as measurement. The downside of this approach is that metering tends to be weak for non-home online usage, i.e. work and any other location out of home.
• To address this, meter limitation tagging is used, whereby website and app owners install a ‘tag’ on their website, app or video player/content. This tag returns visit data to comScore (UKOM’s current data provider) from all locations.
• comScore then use a statistical process known as Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) to combine these two data sets to produce reconciled, all-location data for unique visitors, page views and duration-based metrics.