7Days is first in Middle East to go public with daily BPA interactive web traffic data

All sites audited by BPA using the Nielsen Site Census technology are measured to the same standards, which exclude non-human spider and robot traffic, as well as internal administrative traffic based on agreed global industry auditing principles as outlined by IAB.

The portal's figures show that in the February 2009 there were 52,029 unique browsers, 102,234 user sessions and 446,394 page impressions.

"We are committed to transparency and delivering comparable data for our advertisers to use across all of our media properties," explains Mark Rix, Chief Executive of 7Days. "It is important for us as a media organisation to be at the forefront of pioneering accountability in the region and believe it is the best way to demonstrate to advertisers that 7Days is a brand that should rightly be considered as part of their advertising mix."

The new service, which was launched by BPA Worldwide using Nielsen Online technology at the end of last year, addresses the growing market need to enable audited print circulations and audited website traffic data to be concurrently reported so that a media brand can demonstrate both its print and digital reach. It provides daily, continuous reporting of traffic.

Users, both publishers and advertisers, can interrogate traffic data of a chosen site at will, reflecting requirements provided by media planners during a two-year consultation process. Using Nielsen Online's Site Census tagging technology the service will provide media owners, advertisers and media buyers with near real-time access to the metrics most commonly used for advertising planning and purchasing decisions.

"There continues to be discussions in the Middle East about delivering online media insights on qualitative as well as quantitative measures,"

explains Stuart Wilkinson, BPA Worldwide's Managing Director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

"BPA Interactive's offering means that whilst the industry continues to review a suitable qualitative solution, the verified quantitative web traffic activity offered by BPA Interactive remains transparent, reliable, comparable and now readily available."

BPA members around the world have been testing the new system since last October, before opting to go live. Presently more than 200 publisher websites globally are in the testing process. The number of sites that are providing live data is starting to emerge as publishers understand the differences between the BPA/Nielsen measured traffic and their previous internal analytics data.