You Got Your Chocolate In My Peanut Butter!-Can Web Analytics and Panel-Based Data Really Be Good Together?

As the online adver­tis­ing mar­ket and breadth of pub­lish­ers have grown over the years, the con­tin­u­ing chal­lenge for adver­tis­ers and pub­lish­ers alike has been telling the true story of the online audi­ence. Know­ing the real mea­sure of a site’s online audi­ence means real dollars-both in adver­tis­ing rev­enue deter­mined by CPM rates as well as mar­ket val­u­a­tion to ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists for start-ups or privately-held com­pa­nies, for example.

The two estab­lished method­olo­gies that sites have come to rely on in mea­sur­ing audi­ences (vis­i­tors) include web ana­lyt­ics (server-based) data and panel-based mea­sure­ment from an opt-in group of inter­net users (the panel). To under­stand the chal­lenges that have existed between these two method­olo­gies, you first need to under­stand the objec­tives and approaches for each. Web ana­lyt­ics has gen­er­ally been used to under­stand the vis­i­tor activ­ity on a site, such as page views, videos watched, pathing through the site, con­ver­sion rates for those pur­chas­ing prod­ucts, etc. This insight pro­vided by web ana­lyt­ics has enabled innu­mer­able online busi­nesses to opti­mize their sites by pro­vid­ing bet­ter, more engag­ing expe­ri­ences for the vis­i­tor such as more effi­cient shop­ping cart processes and dis­play of more rel­e­vant con­tent based on pre­vi­ous con­tent consumption.

On the other hand, panel-based mea­sure­ment has gen­er­ally been used for com­par­a­tive mea­sure­ment between sites to effec­tively deter­mine broader vis­i­tor habits and pro­jec­tions for the greater Inter­net pop­u­la­tion. Panel-based audi­ence mea­sure­ment has pro­vided a way to mea­sure a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant sam­ple of online audi­ences to deter­mine how one site, such as an e-commerce or news & enter­tain­ment site, would com­pare to other sites and project this to the broader Inter­net pop­u­la­tion. The panel-based mea­sure­ment approach has become one of the pri­mary ways for pub­lish­ers and adver­tis­ers to arrive at a gen­eral val­u­a­tion for adver­tis­ing rates for sites com­mand­ing cer­tain audi­ence sizes, demo­graphic makeup, and more.

Yet both method­olo­gies are not with­out their own spe­cific short­com­ings and mea­sure­ment nuances. One par­tic­u­lar issue for web ana­lyt­ics is the dele­tion of cook­ies, which are the files used to com­mu­ni­cate between that local machine and the host site to deter­mine site pref­er­ences, repeat visit activ­ity, and other anony­mous activ­ity. Cookie dele­tion on a visitor’s PC would typ­i­cally mean over count­ing that vis­i­tor as a new vis­i­tor when they are actu­ally mak­ing a repeat visit to their favorite e-commerce site, for exam­ple. Panel-based mea­sure­ment approaches usu­ally encounter issues when it comes to mea­sur­ing “at work” activ­ity as many IT orga­ni­za­tions pro­hibit the instal­la­tion of the soft­ware nec­es­sary to mea­sure the opt-in panel participant’s Web activ­ity. This means that the online activ­ity of audi­ences may be under counted since it does not include that lunch time surf­ing at work to catch up on the week­end col­lege foot­ball results at ESPN​.com. Plus, much smaller sites with niche audi­ence focus may not be ade­quately rep­re­sented in an opt-in panel which would result in under count­ing audi­ence activ­ity as well.

So how does a site come to an accu­rate or closely rep­re­sen­ta­tive view of what their audi­ence size and makeup really is? There have been a num­ber of promi­nent arti­cles writ­ten bring­ing this very issue to light, includ­ing cov­er­age in the NY Times, For­tune, and Busi­ness­Week mag­a­zine dat­ing back to Octo­ber 2006. The real­ity is that the “best” num­ber rep­re­sent­ing a site’s online audi­ence is some­where in between that pro­vided by the web ana­lyt­ics report­ing and the panel-based mea­sure­ment. So how do we get to this number?

Enter Omni­ture and com­Score. Our announce­ment on Sep­tem­ber 21 of this strate­gic part­ner­ship cre­ates a solu­tion com­bin­ing comScore’s rich audi­ence mea­sure­ment data with web site vis­i­tor data cap­tured by Omni­ture Web analytics-SiteCatalyst. This solu­tion will pro­vide adver­tis­ers and pub­lish­ers with a uni­fied mea­sure­ment sys­tem result­ing in the industry’s most com­pre­hen­sive view of dig­i­tal audi­ence mea­sure­ment. This strate­gic solu­tion will ben­e­fit pub­lish­ers, which become more appeal­ing to adver­tis­ers by pro­vid­ing more com­pre­hen­sive data on site vis­i­tors, par­tic­u­larly smaller pub­lish­ers who may have been pre­vi­ously under-represented to adver­tis­ers. And it will also ben­e­fit adver­tis­ers, which can use this com­pre­hen­sive view of dig­i­tal audi­ence mea­sure­ment for more tar­geted media planning.

This is a really excit­ing devel­op­ment which will pro­vide these adver­tis­ers and pub­lish­ers the con­fi­dence to rely on one set of met­rics for a con­sis­tent mea­sure of audi­ence reach and online ad per­for­mance. This solu­tion will reduce com­plex­ity, save time, and enable adver­tis­ers & pub­lish­ers to increase return on ad spend (ROAS) in an increas­ingly frag­mented dig­i­tal marketplace.

So, will this new choco­late (web ana­lyt­ics) and peanut but­ter (panel data) com­bi­na­tion taste good for your busi­ness? Let us know what you think!