Effective Measure vs Google Analytics vs Nielsen Online
The Digital Media and Marketing Association (DMMA) of South Africa announced in February 2011* that they had appointed Effective Measure as their online audience measurement partner.
“The DMMA has long promoted accurate, efficient and cost effective digital publishing measurement as being vital for growth in the local digital sector. The tender process allowed the elected sub-committee to evaluate a number of global suppliers and select the measurement solution most suited to the South African market place,” said the DMMA.
The new Effective Measure system replaces Nielsen Online which will be used by most publishers until the end of March 2011. Many well known publishers have already begun running the new Effective Measure code on their websites.
Despite running the Effective Measure and/or Nielsen Online code, nearly all publishers are also running Google Analytics code on their websites because of Google’s very easy-to-use traffic interface and trending functionality.
Effective Measure versus Google Analytics versus Nielsen Online
Many questions have been raised about the accuracy of the three traffic measurement systems, especially since Effective Measure is likely to report lower unique visitor numbers for the websites than Nielsen Online and Google Analytics.
Google explained that their Google Analytics service allows subscribers to analyse many different and important factors, and track sales, conversions and e-mail campaigns, banner ads and also integrate with AdWords and AdSense.
“Google Analytics uses first party cookies to ensure reliable tracking and protect visitor privacy,” Google said.
When quizzed about the accuracy of Google Analytics, Google said that they “are not going to get into a running commentary over who does what better,” adding that they are very proud of their market leading analytics solution.
Effective Measure’s James Robertson said that they are a leading Digital Measurement and Research provider, measuring over 2,000 websites worldwide and over 200 million people each month.
“Effective Measure is not designed to be a Web Analytics solution, it is a Digital Media and Demographic planning tool. Unlike a Web Analytics solution, Effective Measure does not report on detailed web analytics data such as user paths, conversions, individual pages or bounce rates,” said Robertson.
“Effective Measure reports top line media measurement metrics which are relevant to Advertisers, such as Page Views, User Sessions, Unique Visitors and Frequency / Engagement. These important measurement metrics are layered with both rich and robust demographic insights about a website’s audience.”
Robertson added that this level of detail helps all websites gain more advertising revenue and present their case independently to advertisers, on a tool where all websites are measured with the same methodology.
“A key difference between Effective Measure and other Web Analytics services such as Google Analytics or Nielsen Online, is in relation to our unique, patented measurement methodology, Digital Helix,” said Robertson.
“Other legacy systems primarily use what is known as a Third Party Cookie for determining Unique Visitors to a website. Whilst this approach has some great strength in its possibilities, it has become less reliable over the past 10 years due to the rapid advancement of internet access devices and browsers.”
“Third Party Cookies are more prone to being deleted on a regular basis, leading to a much higher over inflation of a website audience visitors, as the same user is being treated as a new user. This is especially prevalent on nextGen mobile devices, which don’t support third party cookies reliably and in actual fact will count a new visitor for each page visited in that session.”
According to Robertson the Effective Measure Digital Helix is a true combination of best measurement practice.
“It utilises a First Party Cookie for more accurate website visitors and a Third Party Cookie to look at the duplication across multiple websites of interest to that user.”
Effective Measure then fuses these two measurement practices together to provide a more reliable visitor count for the website, leading to more accurate figures being reported and a greater level of trust in the numbers by the advertising community.
Nielsen Online was asked for comment about their traffic measurement system and how it compares to its competitors, but the company did not respond by the time of publication.
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