Linda Abraham (LA) speaks with I-COM World Measurement News Blog author, Andreas Cohen (AC), about comScore's products and future.
AC: comScore’s Media Metrix 360 is a hybrid approach to audience measurement, blending panel and site centric (server side) measurement, correct? There are a number of companies who have been using hybrid approaches in Europe for a number of years. How is comScore’s different?
LA: While the idea of blending panel and server measurement is not new, Media Metrix 360 is a ‘panel centric hybrid’ that is quite different from other approaches in a number of important ways. First, we’ve built a very rigorous process of leveraging our panel to reconcile and validate census data for audience measurement purposes. The unmatched size of our panel (2MM worldwide) provides quite a robust set of data that allows us to do this in a unique way.There are methods of counting for web analytics that don’t apply in an audience measurement context. As an example, for page optimization purposes, web analytics processes allow multiple items on a page to be beaconed and counted separately. If a page has a video, a widget, some flash content, each can be beaconed and counted separately, While this makes sense from a web analytics perspective, this should only be counted as one page for audience measurement purposes—and the counting method needs to be uniform across sites. By leveraging our panel, we can cross reference and verify the page counts, making sure each page is being counted once and only once, and that all pages that are counted are legitimate pages by audience measurement standards.
In addition, there are some very important dynamics between cookies and individual users that need to be taken into account. Cookie deletion is an obvious factor. Some hybrid approaches make general or ‘average’ adjustments to estimate the impact. Our research has shown that there is a lot of variation on cookie deletion behavior at the individual person level, and that it varies by both the size of the site and the frequency of visitation. Our methodology accounts for these factors. In addition, there are a host of issues related to allocating a given session to the correct person using the computer that are uniquely addressed with our method. Things like multiple cookies per user (from different browsers), multiple users per cookie, and multiple machines per user need to be taken into account. So yes, there are a lot of ‘hybrid’ approaches out there, but we believe ours is the first to leverage a panel in this way, and that we are the first to apply the methodology on a global basis. That’s why we refer to it as ‘panel centric hybrid.’
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