Closing the Web Analytics and Panel Measurement Gap.

Yesterday’s announcement of the partnership between Omniture and comScore to provide a “Unified Digital Audience Measurement Service” added an interesting touch to the Adobe-Omniture deal made public a few days ago.

If you did not read about it you can go here and here to get the nifty details.

It is definitely an interesting piece of news with lots of potential benefits for publishers and advertisers. The expectations of such an agreement can be high. Hopefully the proposed solution will match the expectations and finally close the gap.

It seems that whoever has Omniture tags will be able to activate the comScore Media Metrix 360 tracking with the flip of a switch. (Which will be the extra fee?) It would be really interesting if it works. Is this the only solution resulting from this partnership? Most probably not.

Here are some random initial thoughts and questions on the subject:

• While this can be beneficial for a publisher if the comScore numbers are under representing your real traffic and market share, what will happen if the new numbers look much worse after activating the MM360 tracking? That will may not please some publishers. Can then you go back to the previous status quo?
• Advertisers will of course benefit from having a better picture the audience and reach, instead of a projection. This assuming the Omniture implementation and comScore processing work accordingly.
• What will happen with the publishers that either (A) don’t have Omniture tracking or (B) don’t want to implement it? If we compare their numbers with the ones of websites who are already part of the MM360 program, are we still comparing apples to apples?
• Are we going to have different qualities of audience and reach measurement? “Premium” measurements for the websites who are part of the comScore Meadia Metrix 360 program and “Regular” for the rest? Is this going to be a differentiating factor when advertisers look at the numbers of a given web property?
• How is the information going to be shared. If I am part of the program will it be public to anyone that is also part of it? What if the publisher don’t want to make this information public? Can he opt-out?
• Or it is going to work as some Google Analytics Benchmark on steroids, hiding the information from other websites behind an industry segment or category?
• How will competitors such as Hitwise, Compete, Nielsen and Google will react to this new challenge?

For sure many other questions and concerns will be raised. It will interesting to see the evolution of this new measurement service and agreement. For now congratulations to comScore and Omniture!