What are Comscore Rankings and Do They Matter?

In this episode, Whitney goes over what Comscore and their rankings are and if they matter to advertises and publishers. Comscore is a global media measurement and analytics company. They offer 3rd-party measurement of audience demographics and performance for media across multiple mediums. The Comscore Media Matrix uses “panels” to measure audiences, which are often observed by advertisers and agencies. The difference is Comscore’s goal is to measure exactly who an audience is and their consumption behavior and is more traditional in the way it looks at human behavior since the way it tracks audiences across mediums is less objective than digital has become. Additionally, their panel method defines pageviews across all sites. However, Comscore’s panels and their competitor Neilson both rely heavily on voluntary participation in order to provide their composite scoring, meaning audiences, publishers, and agencies must follow what they require in order to participate. Comscore is usually more important to larger agencies and top 50 publishers, as they are typically a point of contention when negotiating contracts, since Comscore sits as a middle-man between. If a publisher doesn’t include Comscore pixels on their pages (often because they slow down sites and can cause errors), they’ll not be counted in Comscore’s rankings. But that actually doesn’t mean an advertiser won’t target an audience on their site. So, advertisers that DO use Comscore when buying through an agency will still target audiences on publisher sites that don’t use Comscore or their competitors. Most ad networks in the Comscore top 50 require publishers to assign their traffic through a Traffic Assignment Letter, which then adds your traffic to their ‘total unique visits’ count and increases their Comscore property size. Partnering with Comscore can leverage traffic to look “bigger.” Publishers can only assign traffic to one place. Ad networks will have you sign a contract so that your traffic is completely signed over to their network, so you can’t sign any other deals.