How Comscore is simplifying pre- and post-campaign measurement for advertisers

Produced in partnership with Marketecture

The following article provides highlights from an interview between Greg Dale, Comscore’s general manager of digital, and Mike Shields, co-founder of Marketecture. Register for free to watch more of the discussion and learn how advanced advertising measurement is providing advertisers access to the deep data they need across all platforms.

For advertisers, measurement must work across mobile, desktop, social, digital and CTV. However, obtaining robust metrics across all these platforms can be difficult.

Comscore has solidified itself as a go-to company for solid measurement for more than 20 years, with strong products for media, video, social, and CTV measurement. The company’s general manager of digital recently spoke with Mike Shields, co-founder of Marketecture; they discussed the media buying side of Comscore’s business, how far it’s come since its inception in 1999 and how it can help marketers and advertisers today.

How Comscore built up strong data and vast measurement offerings

Over the years, Comscore has built up its original desktop-based site rankings to add in mobile measurement and cover reach, unique visitors, time on site, demographics, etc.

Through video metric offerings, the company can also show if someone was watching a video when they visited a site and, if so, for how long — across desktop and mobile. The company has also branched out into the CTV measurement space and, with its acquisition of Shareablee, gained a better foothold in the social media space, too — expanding its social data to include the specific pages visited within social apps.

In addition to expanding product offerings, Comscore has continued improving its collection of data. For example, when the company started in 1999, it relied on robust panels, but to accommodate growth and the changing nature of the digital space, it shifted to a hybrid model in the later 2000s.

“The panel is the brain — you get all the demographics of everyone visiting the site,” Dale said in the interview. “You’re tracking someone who has opted into the panel and provided you with specific demographics, but what you miss in a panel is the granularity of tonnage. When you want to look at a smaller site and see how many pages and sessions they have, it’s much more accurate to calibrate that off of tag-based data that they are sharing back with us.”

While the panels vary by country, in the U.S., Comscore has more than 150,000 panelists on desktop and 20,000 on the mobile side, with over 5,000 websites tagging and about 1,000 engaging in more intricate tags necessary for streaming services that require more data.

And so, Comscore’s hybrid model of panels and tags allows it to capture more robust and granular data than either one on its own.