Nielsen May online ratings: Electoral Office's time to shine!

•  8 out of 10 mobile banking apps reported increases in unique audiences
•  Top three current events & news sites unchanged: News, SMH, ABC

May 2016 recorded a threefold increase (314%) in the number of Australians visiting the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) site, resulting in an uplift of unique audience numbers from 604,000 to 2.5 million, according to the latest insights from Nielsen Digital Ratings (monthly).

The Department of Finance and Deregulation site contains the AEC channel and subsequently had a significant increase in unique audiences from 1.8 million to 3.6 million during the month of May, an increase of 96%.

The increases to the sites resulted from new enrolments to vote, current voters updating their details, postal vote applications, interest in changes to the senate voting rules and employment opportunities. The increase in unique audiences to the sites is anticipated to continue over the next month in the lead-up to the Federal Election on July 2.

The news category stabilised off an April peak with consistency in the top three leaders news.com.au, smh.com.au and ABC news remaining in the same positions for unique audience numbers. There was some movement amongst the other sites: Yahoo7 returned to 7th from its April peak, The Daily Mail rose from 5th to 4th whilst the Herald Sun jumped above The Age.

In the banking and finance category, eight out of 10 mobile banking apps reported increases in unique audiences. CommBank continues to lead the mobile banking app subcategory with unique audience numbers of 4 million. Other banking mobile apps saw large uplifts in traffic - Bankwest (81.04%), Suncorp Bank (18.81%) and St George (16.74%) over the past month. Westpac Group saw significant increases in unique audiences during May to its Bank of Melbourne (80.47%), St George (18.43%) and Westpac (10.28%) sites.

Dami Im performing at Eurovision 2016 semifinal

Australians continue their love affair with Eurovision, largely due to Australian contestant Dami Im’s success, and subsequently unique audiences to Eurovision sites on SBS.com.au saw a strong overall gain of 17.54%