I-COM worldmeasurementnews

Google announces new traffic model for Ad Planner

Google writes: The new traffic estimation model should help reduce some of the confusion that often surrounds tracking the number of unique visitors to your site. When creating campaigns, many advertisers use media planning tools, including Ad Planner, to look at unique visitors based on estimates of real world users. However, publishers typically rely on web server logs or web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to measure unique visitors based on cookie counts. Discrepencies arise when these two types of unique visitors are compared. You can learn more about this topic by reading the IAB guidelines on Audience Measurement. To address the various ways of measuring site traffic, we... More...

Google TV Ads Offers Time-Shifted Viewership Reports

Yaroslav Volovich, Software Engineer for Google TV Ads writes: TV viewers are increasingly watching what they want when they want it. About 25% of television households in the United States have digital video recorders or DVRs installed. Today, the Google TV Ads team is excited to announce the launch of time-shifted viewership data, which provides you with insight into how and when viewers see your ads during DVR playback of recorded content. As with all metrics in your Google TV Ads reports, time-shifted impressions reflect the viewership of your specific TV commercial, not just general program viewership. And, what's more, this information is available to Google Adwords TV advertisers for free. More...

Keeping Ourselves Honest: Auditing Our Predictions For 2008

Matt Greitzer writes for Mediapost: Each February we at Razorfish release our "Digital Outlook Report," outlining the key trends and predictions in digital marketing over the next year. In this column I will revisit the four major search marketing trends we predicted in 2008, and see how successfully we predicted the future.

Trend 4: Advertisers will shift their focus away from last-click attribution toward multi-click and custom attribution models. This happened, even more than we anticipated. More...

WPP and Omniture Launch Partnership to Improve Marketing ROI

DAVOS, Switzerland—January 29, 2009—WPP (NASDAQ: WPPGY), the world leader in communications services and Omniture, Inc. (NASDAQ: OMTR), the leading provider of online business optimization, today announced a strategic partnership that will provide clients with more effective insights globally across both digital and traditional media channels. As part of this partnership, WPP is making a long-term $25 million investment in Omniture common stock.

The two companies will collaborate on technology development, on sharing data and information and in consulting services. The collaboration will focus on providing chief marketing officers and other marketing executives at clients, with greater consumer insights, supported by new technology. This will allow marketers to increase their revenue and profit returns from online marketing and to manage and optimize their overall marketing expenditures. More...

IAB Canada Creates New Tripartite Industry Committee For Online Audience Measurement

Paula Gignac writes for IAB Canada: Following the success of IAB Canada's Inaugural Tripartite Industry Forum on Online Audience Measurement in Canada on December 10, 2008, IAB Canada is now calling for Agency, Advertiser and Online Publisher Research professionals, as well as Media Buying, Planning and Sales "super users" of comScore Media Metrix (and other Online audience measurement tools), to join together to help advance excellence in the area of Online Audience Measurement In Canada.

"Because the Online media channel has now become an essential part of most Advertisers' media plans, it's imperative that audience measurement tools associated with the Online medium be as accurate as possible in assisting Advertisers and Online Publishers in their individual tasks of researching, planning, buying and selling within the medium," says Paula Gignac, President, IAB Canada. More...

Interwoven Announces Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by Autonomy

Interwoven writes: January 21, 2009, Interwoven entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Autonomy, the clear leader in enterprise search and the front runner in Meaning-Based Computing. The combined company will have more than 2,000 employees and 20,000 customers. Following the close, Interwoven will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Autonomy. This acquisition brings together two quality, high-performing software companies who share a vision to fundamentally change the way organizations discover, analyze and manage information.

Autonomy writes: The combination of Autonomy's Meaning Based Computing technologies (IDOL) (with its ability to understand content) with Interwoven's suite of products (focussed on managing the interactions of people and content) will create a new set of technologies, updating and enhancing Interwoven's products by significantly reducing the levels of manual effort now required. These technologies are ready to address the new need for manage-in-place and extend Autonomy's reach into a new customer base. Interwoven's products know what the customer interactions are, and Autonomy's IDOL will allow them to know what they mean.

About Autonomy
Autonomy is a publicly-listed company with $3B market capitalization with dual headquarters in Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, California. Autonomy is known for its unique ability to understand the meaning of all types of human-friendly information including emails, instant messages, electronic documents, web pages, social networks, audio and video.

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Measuring The Sharing: The Metrics Of Social Bookmarking

Jodi McDermott writes for Mediapost: For the Web analyst, measuring the impact of social bookmarking can be challenging. Most of the social bookmarking tools provide analytics for the code that is placed on the publisher's Web site. In this case the analytics are self-contained in the sharing tool's portal and completely segregated from a site's Web analytics implementation. Specific metrics reported may include:
Button views - the number of times the sharing icon (button) was viewed on the site.
Bookmarks - the number of bookmark events.
Bookmark rate - the number of bookmarks divided by button views.
Emails - the number of times the content was shared via email.
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comScore: Why is Google's Market Share in Hitwise Data So Much Higher than in comScore's?

comScore's Andrew Lipsman writes: comScore and Nielsen are within about half a percentage point of each other, while Hitwise shows Google at a substantially higher 72%. Now, why is it that Hitwise consistently shows a search share about 8 percentage points higher than comScore and Nielsen? A behavior as ubiquitous as Internet search yields extremely robust sample sizes, which means that there should be little variation between the services if each was sufficiently representative of the U.S. Internet audience. More...

Your help needed for global standards by Jan 24th

At the first I-COM Global Summit in Berlin, a vote by attendees yielded that their leading request was the creation of global standards for Internet Audience Measurement. Thus, the I-COM is pleased to support the MIA (Measurement of Interactive Audience) Project. This is a joint initiative by two of our Patronage Organizations, IAB Europe and the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) and has the objective of improving the accountability of the internet as an advertising medium across the globe.

The MIA Project will work towards:
* analysing audience measurement methodologies including user-centric, site-centric and combination systems across the world
* outlining the existing standards
* increasing understanding of these systems and standards and how they can be compared
* studying the potential for industry-agreed guidelines and standards that can be applied to the planning phase of international advertising campaigns

MIA Project Survey
The MIA Project has launched an online survey which will gather views and opinions across the online media industry, from advertisers and publishers through to networks and trade associations. It will establish what the industry as a whole is using as its preferred measures, which audience measurement data users are satisfied with, and where they think measurement needs to develop in the future. This insight will become the foundation for industry standards and guidelines that will help to improve the consistency and overall accountability of the planning criteria of interactive advertising for global campaigns. The survey can be viewed on the MIA Project website at www.MIAProject.org.

Currently, MIA needs more responses from China, Japan, Korea & the US in particular. So if you regularly use audience measurement data as part of your job and haven't participated yet, please support this important initiative by taking a few minutes to complete the MIA Project questionnaire. Click here to link to the survey (www.MIAProject.org). The survey will close on on Jan 24th. We will let you know on this feed when the results have been released.

TNS Compete: Amazon.com Squeezes Already Struggling Rivals

TNS Compete's Matt Pace writes: While the 2008 holiday shopping season brought considerable anguish to the retailing industry, Amazon.com was the standout exception. As rivals lick their wounds and look ahead to a challenging 2009, the retailing giant offered them a measure of salt recently by reporting the holidays were actually its “best ever.”

Amazon’s December traffic surged 20% year-over-year, outpacing Target.com and Walmart.com’s respective 16% and 15% growth. In contrast, eBay’s December traffic (~80 million unique visitors) remained flat for the third consecutive year. More...