New Unified Digital Audience Measurement Service

New, Unified Audience Measurement Capabilities to Provide Publishers a Deeper Understanding of Audience Reach and Advertisers the Intelligence Needed for More Effective Media Planning

Omniture and comScore to Deliver Unified Digital Audience Measurement Service

Omniture, Inc., a leading provider of online business optimization software, and comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced a strategic partner relationship to deliver a unified digital audience measurement system. Specifically designed to meet the unique demands of the digital advertising world, the offering will combine the power of Omniture’s Web analytics with comScore’s new Media Metrix 360 hybrid audience measurement to help provide publishers and advertisers with a unified and comprehensive view of online audiences.

Two of the keys to implementing a successful digital marketing initiative are the ability to measure and analyze online marketing performance and to capture accurate views of audience reach across multiple information sources. To date, publishers and advertisers use two primary sources for measuring the impact of digital advertising – Web analytics and panel-based audience measurement. Because the two measurement methodologies have disparate objectives and employ different data collection technologies, the resulting dissimilar metrics can cause confusion and uncertainty among publishers and advertisers. This strategic partner relationship blends these two methodologies in a highly automated way to create a unified approach for audience measurement designed to enable publishers to represent themselves in a more comprehensive manner to advertisers, and for advertisers to better optimize their media planning with the benefit of more extensive media reach data.

This relationship between Omniture and comScore will enable organizations to unify their online and panel-based audience measurement information, providing more consistent and more comprehensive standard metrics. With the combined offering, publishers and advertisers will be able to automate data integration and reconciliation, eliminate the need for publishers to implement time consuming multiple data collection methods and reduce the labor-intensive steps needed to deliver unified audience measurement.

“We are excited to join forces with Omniture, a leader in quality and innovation in the Web analytics industry, to bring this solution to the marketplace,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore President & CEO. “As leading providers of Internet audience measurement and Web analytics, comScore and Omniture are working to provide the marketplace a much-needed solution for consistent Web-wide measurement. This relationship will deliver to our customers the solution that they have been seeking, thus helping to promote and accelerate the usage of digital marketing intelligence for delivering actionable business results and competitive advantage. We believe it will also help the industry overcome concerns of inconsistent measurement of digital audiences and promote further adoption of digital media advertising.”

“Since the rise of digital advertising, advertisers and publishers alike have sought ways to reconcile their Web analytics and panel-based measurement data to establish a unified measure of online audiences,” said Josh James, Omniture CEO and co-founder. “With this relationship, Omniture and comScore will enable publishers who have rich, highly targeted audience segments to reliably demonstrate their value to advertisers and also help advertisers find these attractive consumer segments. The combined offering will provide advertisers and publishers with a common currency to measure the value of online audiences across an ever-increasing number of digital channels.”

Tangible Customer BenefitsToday and in the Future

The strategic partner relationship is intended to allow joint Omniture and comScore customers to use Omniture tags to collect and share information with Media Metrix 360 using Omniture Genesis integration technology, quickly bypassing the normal implementation process for Media Metrix 360.

The relationship also opens up the possibility of joint product initiatives that will leverage the granularity of the Omniture site-specific data with the Web-wide view of Internet user behavior provided by comScore.

Availability of Unified Digital Audience Measurement Service

comScore and Omniture customers interested in the new service should contact their respective account managers.

Industry Support

“The partnership between Omniture and comScore represents a significant step forward for the digital media measurement community,” said David McBride, director of Business Intelligence at Comcast Interactive Media. “To have these two leaders forge an alliance and provide the industry with an integrated solution for server and audience measurement will help us better understand and improve upon our digital performance.”

“Despite digital being the most measurable medium, it has unique dynamics that make measurement significantly more challenging than simply counting clicks,” said Larry Gelfand, senior vice president, digital sales and business development, National Hockey League. “Both census-level web analytics and person-based audience measurement services are essential to evaluating digital media performance, and to finally see these two measurement technologies brought into alignment is an extraordinarily positive step for those invested in the digital medium.”

“Publishers have always relied on both site analytics and audience measurement data for understanding the performance of our web properties,” said Tomer Strolight, president, Torstar Digital. “Even though the two measurement platforms are used for different purposes, the disparities between the two have been somewhat disconcerting. This effort to harmonize the two data sets and understand the source of the disparities will give everyone in the industry a better understanding of their data and give us more confidence in the decisions we make based on these metrics.”

“The partnership between comScore and Omniture has the potential to move the measurement of online media several steps forward,” said Scott McDonald, SVP Research, Conde Nast Publications. “For more than a decade, we have fretted about – and sometimes quarreled about — the discrepancies between the audience estimates derived from third-party panels like comScore’s and those derived from web site analytics systems like Omniture’s. This collaboration represents the most significant effort to date to harmonize the two approaches and give the industry, at last, a common and convergent set of numbers.”

“It is terrific to see these two industry giants collaborate on a solution to this longstanding problem of reconciling panel and server data,” said Patrick Lauzon, executive vice president, SUN Media (Quebecor Media Co.). “This is yet another example of comScore and Omniture being leaders in the field and providing the mission critical solutions the industry has been calling for.”

“The digital industry has grappled with the differences between panel and server information for many years,” said Graham Mosey, SVP and General Manager, CanWest Digital. “We were one of the first comScore clients to support the Media Metrix 360 project because we saw the obvious benefits. The comScore-Omniture partnership eliminates the implementation burden and will expedite the expansion of this new form of measurement. Having as many publishers as possible involved can only be good for the industry. This is a groundbreaking development which is extremely exciting.”

Source: comScore