5th June 2014: IAB Australia and Nielsen have revealed some early findings from the first media quality audience measurement panel for smartphones and tablets in the Australian market. This pilot project runs through till the end of December 2014 and passively tracks the behaviour of 1,500 Australians using these devices. This project will provide the industry with data on actual behaviour rather than self-reported consumer data that has been the primary source of market level information to date.
The data released today is based on activity for April 2014 and is a very early sneak preview revealed especially for the Mumbrella 360 conference. The project will continue to evolve over the coming months and more data will be released to the market and clients throughout the year.
The results released will help the marketing community understand the activities undertaken millions of Australians every month.
Estimated # of Users Per Month
Smartphone 14 million
Featurephone 4 million
Tablet – ipads 8 million
Tablet – Android 3 million
As seen in other markets although sessions and activities are spread across browsing and applications, the majority of time spent for both phones and tablets is on applications.
Average Monthly Time Spent
Smartphone – browsing 4 hours
Smartphone – apps 18 hours
Tablet – browsing 7 hours
Tablet – apps 15 hours
Although as expected there is a skew towards younger people spending more time on their mobile devices, activity is significant across all age groups.
Early data indicates that although mobile activity is significant in Australia, time spent on these device is currently smaller than in markets where either there is little desktop activity or there are significantly different mobile data plans or public WIFI options.
Not surprisingly there is a heavy amount of social activity across both applications and browsing. Search is currently dominating browsing time and gaming represents 14% of application time on smartphones and 15% on tablet. In the browsing data for both smartphone and tablets there is a significant amount of news & information activity (19% on smartphone, 10% on tablet) and retail activity (9% on smartphone, 12% on tablet).
Gai Le Roy, Director of Research of IAB Australia, commented: “Although these are very early results and we will see changes to the data over the coming months, the IAB is thrilled to see that the large industry investment that has gone into this project is starting to bear fruit. The numbers will definitely encourage more advertising dollars into the mobile channel which represented 21.5% of the display market in the March 2014 quarter”.
Members can download the full presentation here.
