ChasNote

Comscore’s CEO Magid Abraham announced Media Metrix 360 yesterday at the CM Summit.

Prior to 360, Comscore estimated site traffic by projecting audience activity from a panel of 2 million web users, an approach that tends to under-count unique visitors, especially at niche sites, smaller smaller sites and application activity inside platforms like Facebook. Cookie-based methodologies, like that of Quantcast or internal server logs, run the risk of over-counting unique audience since one person that accesses a site from various browsers (a home machine, a work machine and a mobile phone, say) is counted as multiple unique individuals. Web users who delete cookies also appear (to cookies-based trackers) as multiple people. From Fred Wilson’s post at A VC:

“So the panel based approach has issues and so does the server based approach. The simplistic way I’ve always looked at it is panel undercounts and server-side overcounts. I’ve always advocated a ‘triangulation’ approach to get to the right number.

“So it’s very big news that comScore has spent the past year building an entirely new approach to Internet audience measurement that combines its ‘gold standard’ panel with server-side numbers reported by web services who install comScore’s beacon.”

According to the advertising execs polled for the Advertiser Optimism Reports, 29% of them expect to increase their advertising budgets over the next 6 months, versus only 26% who said that two months ago. Still, 29% also plan to decrease their budgets over that period, but that’s also down from 30% in the same survey back in March.

“Digital media such as online display, online search and mobile are the strongest, with more than half of all respondents anticipating a boost in those ad budgets, while traditional media such as TV, radio, outdoor, newspapers and magazines all are still mainly in negative territory. The traditional medium to show the greatest relative improvement has been cable and broadcast TV, as print media and radio continue to wane.”

Speaking of search, Hitwise numbers show that the total traffic going to website via paid search ads is decreasing relative to traffic via unpaid, organic search listings (via Searchblog).

What’s this mean? It means that “direct response” marketing channels are peaking, as they say in oil-drilling circles. Marketers are buying as much guaranteed traffic as they can from Google, but users of search are becoming more likely (94.75% likely in May 2009, versus 90.16% likely in May 2008) to click on organic results over the paid search ads. Assuming Google’s PageRank algorithm is a fair proxy for relevance of one source of content — a brand — over another, marketers are facing an increasing need to earn relevance instead of buying it.

As we claw our way up from the bottom, expect that the recovery in online advertising will be driven by faster growth in brand-building activities over cost-per-click and other direct-response programs.

UPDATE: Comscore founder Gian Fulgoni says his data show that the percentage of clicks on paid search ads — the click-through rate — has not gone down (it’s stayed flat). Meanwhile, paid clicks are up only 18% over the past two years while search queries are up 68%. Among his explanations for the delta:

“search queries are actually getting longer and that as searchers become more experienced they are using more words per search query. And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.”

Longer queries, though, won’t make organic brand relevance any less important. If you’re McDonalds and web customers search for phrases such as “mcdonalds quarter pounder with cheese 94110,” McDonalds no longer needs to buy paid ads to reach that customer. But if longer queries look more like “healthy salad lunch options 94110,” it needs to make sure it is considered a relevant brand in that conversation.

Unique users up 17% in the past five months, to around 780 million in August 2008.

New research commissioned by Starcom, Comscore and Tacoda finds that optmizing for clicks likely means optimizing away from building brand with your best customers.

“CHICAGO – Media agency Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda, and digital consumer insight company comScore collaborated on a research study whose results call into question click-through rates as a primary source of accountability for Internet display advertising aimed at brand-building. Called ‘Natural Born Clickers,’ the study reveals that a very small group of consumers who are not representative of the total U.S. online population is accountable for the vast majority of display ad click-through behavior.”

The power clickers have less desirable demographics:

“The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites –- a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.”

And there’s no correlation between clicks and brand metrics.

“Further preliminary Starcom data suggests no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked. The research presentation suggests that when digital campaigns have a branding objective, optimizing for high click rates does not necessarily improve campaign performance.”

Sez Erin Hunter, EVP at Comscore:

“‘While the click can continue to be a relevant metric for direct response advertising campaigns, this study demonstrates that click performance is the wrong measure for the effectiveness of brand-building campaigns,” said Erin Hunter, executive vice president at comScore. “For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what’s really important and generating clicks is more of an ancillary benefit. Ultimately, judging a campaign’s effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding while simultaneously drawing conclusions from a sub-set of people who may not be representative of the target audience.”"

From Financial Times:

“‘We have found that social networks are not monetising as well as we were expecting,’ said George Reyes, chief financial officer, as Google reported its earnings for the final quarter of last year. Since Google has guaranteed to make minimum payments to a number of social networks that carry its advertising, principally MySpace, the slow growth of the business had left the company out of pocket and contributed to falling profit margins in the quarter, he added.”

And if you look at Nielsen Net/Ratings or Comscore numbers, you see that conversational or social media sites are driving most of the growth in online usage, so it’s fair to say it’s a very big deal. Perhaps Google needs a new approach to advertising within social-networking content.

I’m surprised to see the relatively small audiences Nielsen Online reports for the Big Four TV networks. From PaidContent:

“Nielsen Online counts ABC in first place with 10.6 million unique visitors in October, followed by NBC with 8.1 million uniques, CBS (NYSE: CBS) with 6.1 million and Fox with 3.4 million.”

Even if you assume there’s no duplication of audience (unlikely), the four networks combined are reaching only 28.2 million monthly uniques online. FM doesn’t yet subscribe to Nielsen, but Comscore reports the 125 independent sites that made up FM in September 2007 (it’s closer to 140 now) reach nearly 42 million monthly uniques. More evidence that as audiences migrate from offline to online media, they aren’t necessarily loyal to their former offline brands.

At FM’s Conversational Marketing Summit this week, Comscore announced its new methodology to track readership and usage at conversational media sites such as social networks, participatory news sites, blogs and wikis. With the improved approach, Comscore reports that Federated Media’s sites reach 42 millions monthly uniques and Facebook’s audience is about 60 million uniques.