Online Measurement

Understanding how your brand is doing online is about more than clicks and page views. It’s about the audience.

Understanding how your brand is doing online is about more than clicks and page views. Nielsen’s comprehensive and innovative online measurement services analyse consumer behaviour, advertising effectiveness, brand advocacy, social media buzz and more. Because we believe in providing a 360 degree view of the consumer, our approach to online measurement doesn’t stop at the computer screen; we understand that an online audience member isn’t just a consumer of digital “cookies,” they’re a shopper, a caring mum, a cricket watcher, a tweeter and a texter.

How We Do It

Nielsen’s unique approach to measurement combines representative, people-based panels with comprehensive, census-based measures to provide a holistic view of the digital universe.

Participating publishers place a Nielsen tag on their content which allows us to apply proprietary filtering mechanisms to remove non-human traffic, blocked IPs, auto refresh and international traffic. The panel data are then calibrated using information derived from the site-centric data. This approach provides a more accurate reflection of page-level activity while maintaining the full-depth of audience insight available from the panel data.

Panel recruitment is conducted using a proprietary methodology that combines the representativeness of a Random Digit Dial (RDD) panel with the depth provided by an online-recruited panel. The calibration sample (a combination of RDD and Nielsen’s own proprietary quarterly enumeration studies) provides a baseline for representative demography and online behavior. This baseline is used to create demographic and behavioral weights for the online-recruited panel. Our patented user-prompting ensures we have the best demographic data upon which to base our weights - and our Media Research Council (MRC) approved desktop meter ensures that we’re measuring people, not just machines.

Innovation

Our new developments represent a significant advancement for the media industry and will provide greater accuracy, faster reporting, and wider coverage than existing online measurement, allowing like-for-like comparisons against other media.

Nielsen’s hybrid audience measurement provides a holistic, all locations and devices view of the digital universe by combining our representative, people-based panels with a comprehensive, census-based approach. Our hybrid methodology better addresses the gap in numbers reported by panel-based and site centric methods.

Nielsen also works closely with industry leaders and content providers to improve and expand upon the ways we track brands online. Leveraging a user base of 500 million users, our strategic alliance with Facebook has resulted in numerous initiatives that are making online media work better for brand marketers by providing rapid, low-bias, high-response feedback.

Learn more about Nielsen’s online measurement services.