The Alliance for Audited Media has completed an audit of La Presse+, the French daily news app by La Presse for iPad and Android tablets. The non-profit auditor says it is the first time it has certified the delivery and measurement processes used in a tablet application.
The AAM’s certification verifies that the reports La Presse provides advertisers about the performance of tablet content and ads are trustworthy and provide a sound basis for audience guarantees. La Presse provides a range of reach and performance metrics, like daily reads, unique visitors and average engagement time, through independent providers Localytics (which tracks content) and AdGear (which serves and tracks ads).
Simon Jennings, president of La Presse’s Toronto sales group, said certified measurement was particularly important for La Presse+, since its value proposition depends on user engagement rather than pure reach. Advertisers need to know that engagements really are happening.
According to the company’s benchmarks, each edition of La Presse+ is read 160-170,000 times per day. The average user spends 44 minutes per session — far longer than they typically spend on text-based desktop sites.
“The level of engagement we’ve got is what separates us from basically any other media product,” said Jennings. “Our website has average user sessions that last minutes at a time, not three quarters of an hour. When you start looking at it that way, you start seeing [tablet] requires a different focus, on engagement measurement rather than audience targeting or click verification.”
Jennings reiterated that La Presse has heavily invested in its tablet strategy. He said 35-40% of the company’s ad revenue already comes from the tablet edition.
