The Traffic Audit Bureau was established in 1933 under the sponsorship of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the Outdoor Advertising  Association of America (OAAA) as an independent, not-for-profit organization to audit the circulation of outdoor advertising displays. Independent and tri-partite, TAB 's support comes from the three major industry segments: advertisers, advertising agencies and Out-of-Home (OOH) media companies, each of which is represented on its Board of Directors , with controlling interest resting with the advertiser/agency segments. This structure ensures buyer control over governing policies and auditing practices and thus guarantees the main objective of audits- unbiased, third party collection and verification of facts.

In 1990, TAB was renamed the Traffic Audit Bureau for Media Measurement to reflect its merger with the Out-of-Home Measurement Bureau and the expansion of its auditing activities. Since then, three additional industry associations have been represented on TAB 's Board: the Advertising Research Foundation, the Eight-Sheet Outdoor Advertising Association and the Shelter Advertising Association.

In December 2000 TAB began a four year process to dramatically upgrade its standardized audit methodology. The new methodology is based on a market centric, database approach where TAB has now assumed responsibility for the gathering of all raw traffic data used to calculate DEC. This is being done on a DMA by DMA basis. Previously the audits were done on a plant centric basis where individual plant operators gathered their own raw count data. New audits are being released starting in January 2005.

In December 2004 TAB 's Board of Directors voted to expand TAB 's role to assign TAB to a leadership role in defining and assisting in the implementation of selected industry audience research projects.