Andrew Frank

For a long time, web publishers and advertisers have been caught in the crossfire between web analytics and media metrics vendors producing starkly different numbers for their sites. Now, by joining forces, ComScore and Omniture have potentially eliminated this maddening issue…at least for their common customers. (To be precise, Omniture customers can opt-in to see benefits of the partnership without being Comscore customers, but the strongest benefits are likely to accrue to customers of both.) By fusing methodologies through a common SiteCatalyst tag (no retagging necessary), they’ve also dramatically changed the web measurement landscape, and thrown their competitors collectively off balance.

The issue is the long-standing disparity between measurement methodologies, which continues to produce gross discrepancies between the traffic measurements supplied by web analytics services (like Omniture) and the panel-based measurements typically supplied by media metrics providers (like ComScore). Since web analytics uses tracking pixels and server logs to generate traffic data, issues like accessing sites from multiple devices or locations, or cookie deletion, or spider misidentification, will tend to overcount the number of unique visitors to a site, while issues like panel size or universe limitations (i.e., at-work vs. at-home vs. mobile usage) will tend to undercount uniques. As a result, while the two camps bickered, web publishers and advertisers suffered from a lack of unified measurement that cost them  time, money, and credibility, belying the oft-repeated cannon that the web is our most measurable medium.

Since a unified measurement is so beneficial, the competitors of Omniture (such as Coremetrics or Webtrends) and ComScore Media Metrix (such as Nielsen/NetRatings or TNS Compete), now seem to have two choices:

1. They can join the dance and announce their own competitive alliances (potentially seeding major market share), or
2. They can finally get serious about addressing the remaining issue for customers, which is the lack of standards that continues to hamper interoperability, create switching barriers, and limit the scope of these types of alliances.

In a world governed by open standards, a web analytics customer would be able to opt-in to provision its server data to any or all panel-based metrics vendors for refinement, targeting, and advertiser arbitration, and we wouldn’t need alliances. In the absence of such standards, ComScore and Omniture have done the right thing by burying the hatchet and solving an acute problem for their customers, who are bound to be thankful. Now that they have, perhaps the new landscape will be more conducive to accelerating the slow pace of standards development.

One problem seems to be the dueling roles of the IAB (on the metrics side) and the Web Analytics Association (on the web analytics side)…perhaps they can follow Media Metrix Hybrid 360’s example and form a joint panel to resolve this. In the mean time, the publishers and advertisers should weigh in with their vendors on which course they’d prefer to see them take.

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