Announcing: Adobe AudienceResearch

Adobe recently announced gen­eral avail­abil­ity of a new prod­uct, Adobe Audi­enceRe­search. This announce­ment builds upon Adobe’s Audi­ence Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Pro­gram to pro­vide con­tent pub­lish­ers with an inde­pen­dent cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of key Site­Cat­a­lyst met­rics. This enables pub­lish­ers to accu­rately rep­re­sent their audi­ences in the ad sell­ing process for ads whether those ads appear on sites, in dig­i­tal mag­a­zine edi­tions, or in mobile applications.

Before today, audi­ence mea­sure­ment ser­vices relied almost exclu­sively on panel-based mea­sure­ment sys­tems that use the behav­ior of a few peo­ple to esti­mate the behav­ior of the entire pop­u­la­tion. The result is that try­ing to guess how big your audi­ence really is often feels like plac­ing a bet at the horse track.

Audi­enceRe­search was built to address these con­cerns and pro­vides the fol­low­ing key ben­e­fits to Adobe Cer­ti­fied Publishers.

Accu­rate

The Sample-method: The esti­mates of audi­ence size are fre­quently much smaller than the actual size you see when you mea­sure the whole pop­u­la­tion. Sam­ples can be use­ful when all you need to do is com­pare the rel­a­tive size of one site to another, but are not as use­ful when you need to know the actual size to fore­cast inven­tory and sell ads.

The Adobe Way: The bet­ter way is to sim­ply mea­sure each and every inter­ac­tion from every indi­vid­ual on the site. Then you fil­ter out the traf­fic you know is invalid based on known rules, and what’s left is your real, address­able audience.

Com­pre­hen­sive

The Sample-method: Accu­racy ques­tions aside, if your audi­ence is below a cer­tain size thresh­old, no esti­mate is avail­able at all because the panel mem­bers sim­ply don’t gen­er­ate sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant lev­els of activ­ity. In addi­tion, sample-based meth­ods are typ­i­cally skewed towards US res­i­dents with less rep­re­sen­ta­tion from other geo­graphic areas. Lastly, behav­ior from, sample-based meth­ods rely on installed soft­ware and strug­gle to pick up at work activ­ity where the col­lec­tion soft­ware is not installed.

The Adobe Way: With tried and tested solu­tions for mea­sur­ing inter­ac­tions on all kinds of sites and on every major plat­form, Adobe can col­lect census-based infor­ma­tion no mat­ter where your audi­ence chooses to con­sume your con­tent. And when you col­lect each and every inter­ac­tion, there is no min­i­mum thresh­old for audi­ence size.

Adobe can tell you how many peo­ple are in your audi­ence, no mat­ter how many there are, no mat­ter where they live, or no mat­ter where they are.

Con­sis­tent

The Sample-method: The actions of the few are used to pre­dict the behav­ior of the many, and the actions of the few are quite var­ied. This means that an esti­mate of audi­ence size has a con­fi­dence level that varies from prop­erty to property.

The Adobe Way: By hav­ing each Adobe Cer­ti­fied Pub­lisher com­ply with some basic imple­men­ta­tion stan­dards, every inter­ac­tion from every audi­ence mem­ber is col­lected, processed, stored, and reported the same way. Every time.

Trans­par­ent

The Sample-method: As we’ve talked to pub­lish­ers, we fre­quently hear con­cerns about the “black-box” nature of how panel data is turned into audi­ence esti­mates. It’s hard to have con­fi­dence in a num­ber with­out an under­stand­ing of how that num­ber was derived.

The Adobe Way: Ear­lier this year, Adobe achieved accred­i­ta­tion with the Media Rat­ing Coun­cil (MRC). This means that every year an inde­pen­dent audit­ing firm comes in to exam­ine every­thing involved in the col­lec­tion, pro­cess­ing, stor­age, and report­ing of Cer­ti­fied Audi­ence Data to ensure valid­ity, reli­a­bil­ity, and effec­tive­ness. Audits are con­ducted in accor­dance with stan­dards from the MRC and the Inter­ac­tive Adver­tis­ing Bureau (IAB).

Adobe’s ver­i­fied com­pli­ance with indus­try stan­dards means that every­one can get com­fort­able with the processes and pro­ce­dures that Adobe uses to pro­duce the Cer­ti­fied Met­rics. There is no guess­work about where the num­bers came from, because a new report in Site­Cat­a­lyst will account for every audi­ence inter­ac­tion page by page and tell you which ones were valid and which ones were not. If they are not valid, we’ll tell you why.

At Adobe, we also under­stand that your data belongs to you, and for that rea­son, use of Audi­enceRe­search is entirely opt-in for customers.

Real-time

The Sample-method: In order to reach sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance, panel-based meth­ods com­bine data for an entire month before releas­ing their data. This results in audi­ence data not being avail­able until half-way into the next month.

The Adobe Way: Adobe has always oper­ated in real-time. Cleans­ing and val­i­da­tion of Adobe Cer­ti­fied Audi­ences is done in real time and is avail­able within Site­Cat­a­lyst in moments.Metrics in Audi­enceRe­search are updated once daily when the day’s pro­cess­ing is com­plete, so that you can get the data you need when you need it.