Web Ratings: Heavy Traffic Ahead - Company Business and Marketing

Industry Standard, The, Sept 25, 2000 by Joshua Hallford

ComScore's 1.4 million surfers are ready to be tracked. Will this new panel work?

IF A SURFER VISITS YOUR SITE BUT there's no one there to notice, does it still count as a visit?

It may sound like a question for a college philosophy course, but it's a matter of life and death for those who place and sell banner ads. A company's online ad rate -- that is, its revenues -- turns on its traffic count and sales. Although three market research outfits already measure traffic, Net executives grumble that these firms fail to measure smaller sites and don't record online spending.

"What we really need is a completely new set of numbers," says Rosanne Siino, a VP at PlanetOut, a community and commerce site for gays and lesbians that believes it gets undercounted by current methods.

Enter ComScore, a startup in Reston, Va., which this week begins to measure visits and online shopping with a panel of 1.4 million users. That's more than 11 times as many panelists as the survey samples of its three largest rivals.

Yet bigger isn't necessarily better when it comes to gauging people's online preferences. And ComScore's effort only highlights the difficulties of measuring Net traffic.

Magid Abraham, ComScore's CEO and co-founder, insists the larger panel lets the company go "beyond just how many eyeballs see a Web site." He argues it will provide a more detailed analysis than its competitors -- Nielsen NetRatings (65,000 panelists), Media Metrix (55,000) and PC Data (120,000).

For instance, competitors' panels seldom analyze traffic to online businesses receiving fewer than 200,000 unique users per month. By contrast, ComScore's larger panel is supposed to let it cover activity at such sites.

More important, ComScore claims it tracks online purchases down to the specific items consumers buy, as opposed to recording only the URLs of pages viewed by panelists, like its rivals. ComScore can then cross-reference browsing and shopping habits with purchasers' demographics.

But competitors dismiss the firm's approach. With 130 million Web users, the difference between Com-Score's 1.4 million panelists and the smaller numbers of others isn't all that significant, they say. Just because ComScore has more panelists also doesn't mean it's a more representative sample of total Web population.

Unlike those who retain panelists with stipends of less than $100 a year, ComScore lures participants by offering them technology for faster Web-page downloads. This service can change the way people use the Net, making them less typical of the community at large.

"You're inherently getting a skewed behavior profile, potentially toward heavier purchasers," charges Tim Meadows, NetRatings executive VP of content and commerce.

ComScore recruited its panelists by running banner ads and partnering with Greenfield Online, a polling firm, and Gator, a company that assists online shoppers. To become a panelist, a person has to download ComScore software, which in turn tracks online habits.

Other media rely on panels to measure performance; it's the method A.C. Nielsen uses to measure TV viewer-ship and Arbitron employs to gauge radio listeners. ComScore is looking to become the leading arbiter for the Net, but it's going to have to dispel some doubts. "Any sampling of people is only as good as its randomness," says PlanetOut's Siino. "If for some reason that sample didn't include gays and lesbians, our site would probably not be well- represented."