ComScore and Google Analytics
Audience and effectiveness measurements of digital media, both native and online versions of the traditional ones (newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television channels), have been made since the beginning of this century, mostly through ComScore tools. This company was born in Reston, Virginia.
ComScore is dedicated to providing cross-platform measurement data on audiences, brands, and consumer behavior. For this purpose, it uses a sample of more than 30,000 users who have a software called cProxi installed on their computers, which registers all the web pages that the user visits and combines this data with demographic information obtained before, such as sex, geographical location, age groups, etc. Then the methodology of the very common EGM (General Media Study) is used to make a statistical extrapolation of the information.
It also uses census information from the web pages visited, as well as Javascript tags and cookie installation, the same methodology that is used by Google Analytics. The mixture of the two systems, then, results in a unified data that includes:
Calculation of the average number of cookies per person, related to all the data collected in a specific geographical area.
Extrapolation of this average, which allows calculating the number of people who examine the page.
Checking the number of users that were not included in the measurement.
Sum or summary of the two values and this result gives the final data, which then unifies the number of people included and not included.
Using this ComScore method, media consumption is typically measured in more than 70 countries.
However, there are currently discussions about the advantages and disadvantages that it has, compared to Google Analytics. The truth is that the media, like any other business that currently has an online presence, can apply black hat or white hat techniques, indistinctly. The ComScore is used, especially, for the media to use the data that it provides as a sales pitch for advertising, which is where most of the income from said media comes from and which, even, has also become the largest source of funding for free apps.
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