ComScore, Omniture Join Up To Measure Audiences

BARBARA ORTUTAY

NEW YORK (AP) — Two of the largest companies involved in tracking and analyzing Web traffic are joining forces to measure digital audiences more comprehensively.

The partnership involves comScore Inc. and Omniture Inc., which announced Tuesday that it agreed to a $1.8 billion takeover by Adobe Systems Inc.

ComScore and Omniture plan to announce Monday they are launching a unified digital audience measurement system. It will combine Omniture's method of analyzing Web traffic by looking at data collected by Web servers with comScore's estimates of what's happening across the Web using panels of Internet users recruited for the task.

This, the companies say, will give Web sites and advertisers a single source for measuring how many visitors they attract, how often and who those visitors are.

The two companies often came up with different sets of numbers because they had disparate goals and used different ways of collecting data.

Omniture CEO and co-founder Josh James said Web site operators sometimes would read a report on their traffic going down, even as their own server data showed an increase.