Linda Abraham (LA), CMO, comScore, speaks with I-COM World Measurement News Blog author, Andreas Cohen (AC), about comScore's products and future.
AC: What kind of adoption are you getting in the marketplace, and how is your approach affecting measurement? Is it true that going hybrid with comScore means a Web site is guaranteed to have higher audience figures than if it were measured by pure panel-based approaches?
LA: We’re quite pleased by the very strong adoption rate of Media Metrix 360. To date, we have 60% of the top 50 media sites in both the UK and Canada, and 75% in the US participating, with a long list of additional sites in each country that will be participating in the next 60 to 90 days. This confirms both that this is an idea that the market strongly supports, and also that we’ve made implementation very easy. Clients can either beacon with us directly, or they can leverage beacons that are already implemented for web analytics, either through Omniture or, for clients in South America, through Certifica, a company which we’ve recently acquired. We’re currently rolling this approach out in the rest of the world and indications are that it will continue to be well-received.
The question about the implication for measurement is interesting. The answer is that it really depends on a lot of factors. Clearly, for niche oriented sites, long tail sites, and for sites with a large work audience, we’re seeing increases in audience sizes with our hybrid approach. Work measurement has always been difficult for any panel, including ours, to measure well because many companies prohibit their employees from installing foreign code on their work computers, so sites with large at-work audiences are also seeing increases. For very large sites, we’re finding that the numbers are, in many cases, not very different than those we reported using a pure-panel approach. However, at the channel level, it varies. So bottom line, our panel-centric hybrid approach clearly adds an additional level of rigor to our measurement, but it’s difficult to predict the degree of the change beforehand.
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