Welcome to my first posting on comScore Voices. Here, I’ll take the opportunity to discuss topics and provide information that I hope will be relevant – and valuable – to anyone who is keenly interested in the continued development of the Internet as a powerful platform for consumers and marketers alike. I’ll also share some of the more important lessons I’ve learned over the course of my career, which includes more than a decade as the CEO of a large public market research company. I’ll leave it to my fellow bloggers from the senior ranks of comScore to outline the objectives they have set for their own postings.

As I was thinking about my first post, a comScore study came to mind that I thought would be of particular interest to the blogosphere. In this study, we examined the differences between those people who use Mozilla’s Firefox as their primary browser versus those who use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Firefox, the upstart in the browser wars, has carved out a meaningful market share against IE.

Our study proves what many might have suspected: Firefox users are demographically different in several important ways. For example, Firefox users are slightly more likely to be male (55 percent) than Internet Explorer users (50 percent).

In addition, compared to IE users, Firefox users more likely to have annual household incomes of at least $75,000.

Firefox users are significantly younger: They are 69 percent more likely than IE users to be between the ages of 18-24.

In summary, Firefox users are younger than the average Internet user, are 26 percent more likely to have incomes above $75,000, and also have a higher likelihood of being male. Interestingly, they are 13 percent more likely to have broadband connections. This leads us to the second part of this topic, which I will post soon, which will address how Firefox users are early-adopters of Web 2.0 technologies. I will also describe Firefox users based on their ‘cognographic’ profile, which is comScore’s proprietary measure of users’ interests, passions and lifestyles.

Please subscribe to our RSS feed to be updated with part two.

We issued an important press release today showing the results of a comScore study on the rate of cookie deletion, and the impact this has on the accuracy of cookie-based server data in measuring unique visitors (UVs) to a site or the reach and frequency (R/F) of an online ad campaign. We based the study on the comScore U.S. database of 400,000 computers. In a nutshell, what we found is that about 3 in every 10 Internet users delete their cookies in a month, with an average deletion frequency of about 4 times per month. First and third party cookies showed approximately the same deletion rates. Because server logs count unique cookies, this means that, unless some adjustment is made to the server data, the deletion of cookies and the subsequent insertion of new ones will result in site servers producing inflated counts of UVs while ad servers will overstate reach and understate frequency. The over-statement in UVs and Reach is by an average factor of 2.5, which is to say by about 150%.

While there are some direct benefits to comScore coming out of this study (it does, after all, serve to reinforce the need for panel-based measurement data such as provided by comScore), our motivation in conducting the analysis was an effort to clarify an issue that has been the source of real confusion in the industry, and one which – to some extent – has probably hindered the growth in online advertising. Here’s why I say that. R/F metrics are such a critical part of virtually all media plans that if the actual delivered R/F is off by 150% from what was planned, it’s reasonable to believe that such a campaign won’t work as planned. Improving the accuracy of the metrics used will be to the ultimate benefit of the Internet advertising industry and we hope our study provides precisely that benefit.

Advertisers and their agencies need to feel confident about the metrics upon which they base their advertising spending decisions. By demonstrating the unreliability of cookie-based measurements alone we hope we have helped establish the important role that third party panels play in providing the accurate R/F metrics needed to help maximize the role of the Internet in multi-media advertising plans.

Hello, I’m Magid Abraham, and I’m the co-founder, president and CEO of comScore. Here on comScore Voices, I hope to share insight on the latest trends and advances in digital media measurement.

For my first post, I want to expand on our recent cookie deletion study and its implications for Internet audience measurement. The study shows that cookie deletion is much more frequent and indiscriminate than previously believed. Because of this, we can see that cookie-based measurement techniques, whether using Web site server logs or web analytics software, can over-represent the number of unique visitors to a site by a factor of 2.5x. For example, cookie-based measurement will count one typical site visitor who deleted cookies 5 times as 6 different visitors. Our study clearly validates what experts have been saying for years: to get accurate unique visitor counts, you need to track people, not cookies.

Some of the early promises of digital media compared to traditional media like TV and radio were measurability and accountability. And there certainly are examples where the promise was delivered. For starters, digital media can provide accurate counts of advertising impressions, a feat that has never been accomplished by traditional media. In addition, the impact of direct response advertising (e.g. credit card solicitations) can be measured accurately through click-through rates. These are huge advantages for digital media.

However, when one considers other types of measurement, the early promises have proven elusive. Even basic reach and frequency estimates which have been routinely delivered by ad servers are now shown by our study to be flawed, with reach inflated and frequency understated. The Internet industry has also found the impact of brand-building advertising harder to measure and certainly not as simple as counting click-through rates. The same is true for online ad campaigns that have an off-line impact or campaigns where there is a time lag between ad exposure and consumer action. Indeed, even something like search, which appears at first blush to be easily quantifiable, turns out to have an impact that extends in time far beyond the initial clicks on sponsored links. For example, in 2005 comScore did a study of the impact of search within the consumer electronics category, which showed that only 2% of searches resulted in a sale within the same Internet session as when the search was conducted, but an astounding 25% of product searches resulted in a sale if one included offline sales and sales that occurred online but after the immediate exposure session. That is an astounding 12.5x understatement of search effectiveness if one were only to measure immediate action such as click through rate or same-session conversion. Only consumer panels offer the ability to accurately track the same consumer over time, in order to fully measure ROI.

Accurate Web site audience measurement is one of those early promises that has routinely been claimed, but just as routinely falsely delivered. Many Web site publishers look at their ‘internal data’ (which is almost always based on cookies) and automatically assume it is correct, without considering the impact of dynamics such as cookie deletion. Unfortunately, many in the media have made the same erroneous assumption. It is common to find sites that over-represent their audiences by a factor of 5 or more when citing server log data. Cookie deletion alone can account for 2.5x overstatement. Failing to exclude visitors from outside the US is another common oversight that can typically induce an overstatement between 1.5x and 4x. The compounding of these two factors alone can lead to an overstatement of between 3.75x and 10x. And this is before we take account of the inflationary impact of including ‘bot’ traffic, ‘push’ traffic and other factors.

I strongly believe that the industry does itself a disservice by continuing to publicly use flawed measurement metrics based on site server counts of cookies. The practice leads to a widespread impression of wild inaccuracies in online audience measurement, something that can only undermine the transparency and accountability of online media. Some even go as far as ‘longing’ for something ‘more accurate’ such as -- perish the thought -- TV ratings!

I hope our study helps educate people to some of the flaws in site-centric measurement. Don’t get me wrong. Site-centric measurement offers benefits in terms of tracking granularity and helping improving site design, so I am the last one to recommend against its use. What I do not recommend, is using it to publicly boast about the size of a site’s audience using metrics such as unique visitors that are unadjusted for the impact of factors such as cookie deletion. This can only lead to confusion, suspicion and, ultimately, loss of credibility for our industry.

Recently, comScore was asked by the IAB to provide clearer transparency with regards to our panel methods for measuring the size of online audiences. comScore welcomes the objective outlined in the IAB Open Letter. We have already had positive and productive discussions with the IAB to initiate a thoughtful and cooperative process for achieving greater transparency and understanding of the root cause of the difference between Web site server logs and panel-based measurements.

We began working with the MRC several months ago as part of an audit of our methodologies to provide that transparency. We intend to continue that effort. We are also in the final stages of an evaluation of our methodology by the Advertising Research Foundation and hope that the results will be publicly released in the near future.

comScore’s panel methodologies reflect the investment of millions of dollars and years of research and development. We are confident that they will stand the scrutiny of a third-party evaluation or audit.

As part of our own efforts at providing the Internet industry with insight into the various ways of counting online audiences, we recently published the results of a seminal study of the impact of cookie deletion on the accuracy of audience counts as obtained from Web site server logs.

The study revealed that cookie deletion is a serious threat to the accuracy of Web site server logs, leading to overstatements in the estimates of unique visitors as obtained from server logs by a factor of as much as 2.5. A representative group of industry experts agreed with our conclusions.

If you would like to view the complete findings of this study, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1389 .

Many of our clients are using comScore’s panel data to adjust their own server log data so as to eliminate the overstatement caused by cookie deletion and we would hope that this approach becomes a standard practice within the industry.

We look forward to demonstrating the quality of the comScore panel methodology to the IAB.

I want to assure the IAB members that comScore is committed to the digital media industry and strives to provide, to the best of its abilities, accurate and unbiased measurement. We look forward to working with the IAB and the rest of the industry on establishing acceptable measurement standards for all participants.

Firefox users are more likely to be tech-savvy, educated, and engaged with user-generated content.

In Part 1 of this post, I reported on the differences in demographics of users of the Firefox browser compared to users of the Internet Explorer browser. Here in Part 2, I’d like to share their ‘cognographic’ profiles with you, which is comScore’s interpretation of people’s interests, passions and lifestyles based on their actual online behavior. Marketers and their advertising agencies use these cognographic profiles to create more persuasive advertising or to design more effective media plans, both based on a better understanding of the characteristics of their target audience.

Our data shows several telling differences between the two groups of browser users. Notably, a significantly higher percentage of Firefox users visit “user-generated content” sites. Specifically, more than six in ten Firefox users visit blog and photo-sharing sites, compared to less than four in ten Internet Explorer users. Firefox users are also more likely to visit sites offering online services such as software downloads (84 percent vs. 54 percent) and web hosting (56 percent vs. 31 percent), as well as sites in the technology (86 percent vs. 60 percent) and technology news (54 percent vs. 29 percent) categories.

Their profile also suggests that Firefox users are more likely to be better-educated or are seeking to be better educated. Specifically, a far greater proportion of Firefox users than Internet Explorer users visited sites in the education category (78 percent vs. 56 percent), sites that sell books (60 percent vs. 34 percent), as well as sites in the directories/resources (reference) category (70 percent vs. 46 percent).