comScore Will Measure The Revenue Potential of Ad Networks

Mere hours after comScore announced the latest statistics for social networks and their usage, the company already has a new announcement. This one is of less interest to the general audience but I believe it is rather important to all website owners with serious plans on monetization of their online properties with advertising using ad networks.

comScore is one of the most popular services that measures audience for specific websites so that website owners could use this information when talking to advertisers. comScore works with a number of advertising networks to measure and assess audiences of all the sites belonging to their networks.

Today comScore is announcing changes in the approach to reporting on the audience for ad networks comScore works with. Now the reports will include two separate data sets for each ad network: actual reach and potential reach.

Obviously, there is a big difference between the two sets: while potential reach represents the unduplicated visitors of all the sites in a network, the actual reach only shows the reach of those ads that are actually served in this network. Obviously, the potential reach is supposed to be much higher and it represents the potential for the network to serve ads on all the sites that are part of the network.

For advertisers and ad agencies the potential reach of ad networks shows how they could increase reach of their advertising by using this or that network while for ad networks the different between actual and potential reach will show the money they lose by not serving ads everywhere they can.

The changes announced today will be available starting from the August data (to be released in mid-September). I believe it is an interesting development for comScore and for the ad networks that work with the traffic measurement company because it will help them realize the true potential for revenue and hopefully will enable them to target advertisers better using the stats for the people their ads don’t reach.

Hopefully it will also permit to attract more international advertisers since currently ads are better served to US audience while visitors from outside of the US are much more difficult to monetize. Chances are that if foreign advertisers realize what international audience they can reach with this or that network, the ad networks themselves will be able to easier persuade them into buying.