Measurement

Since 1976, SAS has developed analytics software to extract intelligence from spectacularly large datasets. Much of its dealings occur in financial services, where decisions around fraud, compliance and risk require trillions of computations. But the comparatively recent proliferation of online channels has created a need for rich analytics among marketers. And as the marketing and […]

Last summer, analysts and industry players predicted viewability would become the standard metric for display branding performance. But for Jonah Goodhart, CEO of analytics services provider Moat, viewability is a starting point to determine the value of a display placement instead of the tool that will kill the clickthrough. “Two-thirds of all the world’s ad […]

In an effort to solidify the stature of its ad viewability offerings, the Google Display Network now allows advertisers to choose to buy only viewable impressions. The addition of the viewability-only option also reflects the demands of Google’s marketing partnerships. “We’ve been making a number of investments to make digital work for brands [including introducing […]

The big problem advertisers have assessing the value of video viewability is that the metric means something different every time it’s used. Publicis Groupe digital buying hub VivaKi hopes it can promise clients across its media-agency siblings a single definition for viewability by using video ad server Vindico’s verification tool, AdTricity, for all video ad […]

After several months in beta, Nielsen is finishing its decadelong project to combine audience measurement of TV, online and mobile with its Digital Program Ratings (DPR). The company is winding down a pilot test, running since May, with nine major clients: ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CW, A&E, Discovery, Univision and AOL. DPR’s public debut next […]

A new report from Neustar’s Aggregate Knowledge notes the strong performance of advertising in social channels in terms of reach (58% better than exchanges) and the ability to deliver more high-quality buyers than ad portals, networks and exchanges. According to Aggregate Knowledge President Rob Gatto, this portends a shift in the role of social advertising […]

While location-based ad delivery was once limited strictly to geofencing, the ability to combine device identifiers, geographic coordinates, and customer history data has added sophistication to location targeting. PlaceIQ is one of the latest companies attempting to introduce more value into location advertising via two product roll-outs last Friday. PIQ Analytics and PreVisit are designed […]

Real-time bidding has gained appeal with major brands, but the idea of using exchange buys for awareness campaigns often spurs the question: How do we measure this? Videocentric demand-side platform Dennoo is getting some attention for the guarantees it offers buyers for its time-based “cost-per-view” pricing model as an alternative to bidding on CPMs. “In […]

The Media Rating Council (MRC) is likely to lift its Viewable Impression Advisory early next year, giving marketers a green light to buy digital media on viewable metrics. This move has also caused vendors to scramble to position their solutions in anticipation of a demand spike for measurement tools. Assessing ad viewability has traditionally been […]

Ecommerce spending in the US grew 13% year-over-year in the third quarter to $47.5 billion, a softening from Q2 when the growth rate hit 15%, according to comScore’s State of the US Online Retail Economy report. “There was a bit of a dip in consumer sentiment,” commented Andrew Lipsman, VP of industry analysis at comScore. […]

Publishers have increasingly embraced products that provide more insight into their inventory and help them manage their ad operations. Yesterday at a panel discussion moderated by Yieldex CRO Andrew Rutledge at ad:tech New York, executives from Fox News Digital, Viacom, Washington Post Digital and Turner Broadcasting discussed the tools they’re using to better leverage ad […]

A lot has been said lately about Twitter’s reach in terms of its monthly active users, but its ability to collect data through plugins like social sharing buttons has gone widely unmentioned. Many websites today include “buttons” on their pages that allow visitors to share content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks by […]

Nielsen recently expanded its partnership with consumer data specialist Experian to cover the former’s Online Campaign Ratings with additional layers of demographic data. The new data represents progress, but some publishers are concerned. Media sellers fault both Nielsen and its audience measurement rival comScore, with its validated Campaign Ratings (vCE), for not keeping up with data-management […]

A panel covering RTB and “viewability” played to a packed room atop the Gansevoort Park Hotel in New York last night. What commenced was a (congenially heated, at times) meeting of the minds between James Green, CEO of Magnetic; Anne Hunter, SVP of global marketing strategy at comScore; Brian Gleason, managing director, North America, Xaxis; […]

Panel-based TV ratings and TV-themed “social buzz” are on a collision course, and audience research mainstay Nielsen is doing everything it can to retain its pole position.  The company today announced “Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings” to measure TV-related Twitter discussion — both the volume of discussion and its total reach. Last fall, Nielsen, through a joint […]

In a summer interview, Facebook’s head of vertical measurement, Fred Leach, described the company’s measurement products and its partnership with Datalogix. In the below follow-up Q&A, Leach digs deeper into the company’s work on mobile measurement, attribution and the CPG category. AdExchanger: What are you working on in terms of mobile measurement? FRED LEACH: There are a couple ways […]

In perhaps the biggest challenge yet to the legitimacy of the Do Not Track standard-making process, the Digital Advertising Alliance is giving up on efforts to build consensus for a browser-based DNT solution for Internet users. The self-regulatory group will also begin its own efforts to initiate a browser-based tracking choice mechanism for Internet users, […]

More than half of connected TV consumers use the apps on their set to view free, online videos and browse the web, a survey by electronics maker and video ad tech firm YuMe finds. To a lesser degree, these consumers — half of them, to be precise — are using their so-called smart TV apps […]

Greater usability, product “stickiness” and the newly acquired ExactTarget propelled Salesforce.com into a strong second quarter, according to analysts. Salesforce.com posted $957 million in revenues, a 31% increase compared to last year. The San Francisco-based company projects its revenues will top $4 billion for the 2014 fiscal year and is on track to hit a […]

After announcing that he had been appointed to an intelligence review panel, Peter Swire, co-chair of the Tracking Protection Working Group (TPWG), which is tasked with creating a universal standard for the “Do Not Track” browser feature, has resigned from the TPWG. A seasoned negotiator, Swire was brought in last November to salvage the DNT […]

The rapid adoption of tablets and smartphones has not been matched with equal intensity by the number of digital sales transactions occurring on those devices, but that divide is beginning to close. In the first half of 2013, m-commerce transactions totaled $10.6 billion in sales, which represents close to 10% of the total digital commerce […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Marc Grabowski, chief operating officer at Nanigans. When I approached the register last weekend at a local Best Buy to purchase an iPhone charger, I was asked if anyone had helped […]

Google’s launch Tuesday of Data-Driven Attribution for Google Analytics Premium users left some questions on the table, including how pertinent offline data would be to the product, where “earned” media fits into the mix and what implications there are for “non-Google” marketers and the entire attribution ecosystem. Forrester Research, which released a Forrester Wave Report […]

Mobility has meant marketers can deliver high-value messages to consumers using less real estate, Nicholas Franchet, Facebook’s head of global ecommerce, told a crowd of 1,150 marketers and retailers today at the eTail East conference. The good? Nearly 50% of time spent on retail sites now happens through mobile devices, according to comScore. Tablet sales […]

The open-source collaboration formed by video demand-side platform TubeMogul last spring to promote an industrywide standard for viewability keeps adding members, but the group is still grasping at definitions that all its members can agree on. In the meantime, a number of key video ad-tech players, namely Tremor Video and YuMe, remain committed to developing […]

If there was any doubt of Twitter’s impact on TV ratings and viral viewership, new findings from Nielsen may help dispel it. Nielsen, which recently ran time series analysis of 221 broadcast prime-time episodes through Nielsen SocialGuide, found that Live TV ratings played a statistically significant role in related tweets for 48% of the episodes. […]

Having worked in managerial roles in tech ranging from tech startups to a stint at Microsoft, where he worked on the Windows operating system, Stephen Purpura was convinced by 2001 that data products were going to be the next big wave. Since that time, he’s been working on nothing but big data-related projects – even […]

Little Rock, AR-based Acxiom is gearing up to launch an “Audience Operating System,” for cross-channel and cross-device ad targeting, in September. “The world is coming to us as big data and insight-based decisioning is exactly what we do,” CEO Scott Howe said during the company’s earnings call. “It is also exactly our vision for the […]

Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford graduate student who has been a highly vocal advocate for consumer privacy, has resigned from the Tracking Protection Working Group, which is charged with setting the browser spec for a “Do Not Track” mechanism. In an email delivered yesterday afternoon to members of the Working Group, Mayer writes, “We do not […]

Viewability has been a trending topic in the online ad space this year, particularly as brand marketers and large publishers vent their ever-present impatience with the lack of metrics for advertising that’s more about creating affinity than direct-response clicks and conversions. In April, Google’s viewable-impression metric, Active View, got the approval of the Media Ratings […]