Ipsos iris: IAB endorsed digital audience measurement currency

At a time when transparency and accountability are critical in media planning and buying, Ipsos iris continues to set the standard as the trusted, independent, and robust source of digital audience measurement in Australia.

Ipsos iris, endorsed by the IAB as the sole and exclusive preferred supplier of digital audience data, has been delivering market-leading insights from January 2023. Following a comprehensive independent audit in early 2025, the system was confirmed as well-managed and fit for purpose — supporting the renewal of IAB Australia’s endorsement through to the end of 2027.

Ipsos iris serves as an inclusive, standardised industry currency, offering consistent and comparable digital audience insights for over 10,000 websites and more than 2,200 apps, capturing the online behaviours of more than 21 million Australians aged 18+ across smartphone, PC/laptop and tablet devices.

Key data integrations with OzTAM for BVOD and Google for YouTube have extended the most complete view of Australians’ digital behaviour into the coverage of audiences on Connected TV to empower agencies, marketers and publishers to plan with confidence.

Ipsos iris measures Australian’s online usage across smartphone, PC/laptop and tablet devices:

Source: Ipsos iris Online Audience Measurement Service July 2026, age 18+, smartphone, PC/laptop, tablet, total Internet population, audience 000s, avg time spent (mins pp) daily.

What Ipsos iris measures

Ipsos iris is an independent, industry standard audience data source for:

• Large through to small media owners, with full measurement aided by tagging and supplementary 3-month average reporting along with guidance on expected variance based on audience size provided to support analysing the audience of niche websites and apps.
• Video audience for YouTube and BVOD platforms across Smartphone, Computer, Tablet and CTV and for websites tagged across Smartphone, Computer and Tablet (e.g. short-form news video).
• Media owner content distributed on social media including YouTube, Facebook, Apple News, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Google News, Pinterest and Snapchat.
• Inclusive measurement of digital content and services (whether or not the organisation subscribes) across 25 categories with over 300 subcategory breakouts such as automotive brands, banking, retail and commerce, university education, utilities, airline travel, telecommunications and ISP, government, news, lifestyle, entertainment etc.
• Media planning either using tools provided within UI to understand duplication and incremental reach, or having the data integrated via API.
• Evaluating media audiences beyond reach including audience composition across a range of demographic and attitudinal characteristics and depth metrics such as time spent.
• Understanding reactions to breaking news and major events with daily overnight volumetric data across tagged websites and apps.
• Ipsos iris audience data is also integrated into other media planning datasets used by agencies and media owners for extended audience profiling and for combined audience with traditional media.
• Coming soonWeekly digital audience data delivered during the following week to provide timely and detailed understanding of audience behaviour.

Ipsos iris measures Australian’s online usage across 25 content categories including:

Source: Ipsos iris Online Audience Measurement Service July 2026, age 18+, smartphone, PC/laptop, tablet, selected categories, audience 000s.

Where audience measurement goes next

In September 2026, IAB Australia released the first findings from its Future of Measurement Report, an industry review examining media planning and advertising effectiveness measurement practices in Australia, identifying priorities to inform industry strategy in 2027 and beyond.

The review found that Ipsos iris digital audience measurement remains a trusted foundation for planning and investment. The opportunity is to build on this foundation while ensuring the service is economically sustainable for the future, through greater collaboration, harmonisation and integration of existing measurement systems.

Looking ahead, measurement needs to become more connected, actionable and future-ready, extending the role of digital audience measurement in planning and linking audience data with complementary media, activation and outcomes measurement, while supporting cross-media planning, AI-powered decision-making and emerging environments such as AI-driven discovery.

Why Ipsos iris now measures an 18+ audience

As part of the ongoing commitment to delivering transparent, robust and economically sustainable digital audience measurement, from July 2026 onwards Ipsos iris changed to report audience based on Australians aged 18 years and over and no longer includes 14 to 17-year-olds in reported digital audience.

Building and maintaining a privacy-compliant passive measurement panel of 14–17-year-olds that consistently reflects the broader digital population at sufficient scale is a challenge faced by audience measurement providers globally. By transitioning to an 18+ universe, Ipsos has focused recruitment and panel management efforts where they deliver the greatest benefit to data quality and reliability for digital advertising planning. The independent audit in 2025 recommended moving to an 18+ audience measurement universe to strengthen the stability of monthly audience estimates and reduce the impact of sample-related variability.

Solving the industry’s hardest problem: cross-device deduplication

Ipsos iris integrates a range of data inputs to create a data set of around 500,000 synthetic respondents.

Ipsos iris data inputs include an ongoing establishment survey of 12,000 per year, a single source, passive panel of 4,000 across 8,500 devices, census data from comprehensive tagging coverage of content owners and data integrations from Apple, Google and OzTAM.

The multi-device, single source panel captures behaviour across all devices from all panellists which greatly improves the accuracy in solving cross-device deduplication, the biggest challenge in measuring online audiences.

Ipsos iris is a stand-alone measurement system that is privacy compliant to current Australian law and GDPR standards, as well as having the flexibility to evolve with changing Australian regulation.

Ipsos iris has been the digital audience currency in the UK since January 2021, using a similar methodology to Ipsos iris in Australia. UKOM commissioned an independent expert to investigate the theory and Ipsos’ application of iris’ synthetic data set — you can read more here.

Independent, audited, industry-governed

The IAB endorsement of Ipsos iris in 2023 was the culmination of a strategic review of industry requirements and a tender process to form and endorse industry standards aligned to the evolving needs of the industry. As part of the IAB’s endorsement, an independent audit of Ipsos iris was conducted in early 2025 which found the system well managed and fit for purpose and contributed to renewing standards and extending the contract of endorsement with Ipsos until end of 2027. Source data integrated into Ipsos iris from data partners is independently verified.

Governance of Ipsos iris includes close and continuous oversight by the IAB Audience Measurement Council (made up of research professionals from 12 media owners) who regularly review KPIs, panel health and methodology, along with data integrity, availability, delivery and usage.