• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 4, 2010

Nielsen Company on Tuesday announced the acquisition of video analytics and technology company GlanceGuide. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Effective immediately, the Palo Alto, CA.-based GlanceGuide's analytics technology has been integrated into Nielsen's online video measurement tools.

With the deal, Nielsen is hoping to provide media publishers, agencies and advertisers with more actionable daily insights. In particular, Nielsen clients should now have a better understanding of who is watching their online video, and how consumers interact with online video content and advertising.

"This is truly a match where the sum is much greater than the parts," GlanceGuide co-founders Indra Mohan and Desikan Jagannathan said in a joint statement. It will "enable media clients to better sell their audience, while providing marketers with the tools to improve the effectiveness of their advertising."

Through the deal, Nielsen says it is now able to offer clients a new online video measurement metric: an "attentiveness score," which aggregates key variables like viewing duration, video visibility, and audio volume to provide a composite 'score' for a piece of video content or advertising.

"This was a natural and exciting extension of Nielsen's current offerings to the advertising community," said Dave Osborn, SVP of online product leadership for The Nielsen Company.

This acquisition also comes on the heels of Nielsen's recent announcement in the U.S. to provide clients, through its "Extended Screen" initiative, with the ability to see how the same piece of content performed on TV versus how it performed online.

In 2009, Nielsen selected GlanceGuide as its preferred technology partner to streamline its video data collection process. The partnership provided clients with a single technology solution, which let allowed for audience measurement, advertising effectiveness research, and analytics and optimization.