Not All Categories Get Blog Bounce, comScore Finds

Apparel, food and beverage, and low-cost product categories are better received by consumers visiting blogs than other types of marketers, according to Chicago-based comScore's new product that measures consumer consumption of marketing through blog and social network conversations.

"More serious categories such as insurance, financial services and pharmaceuticals do not engage blog visitors as well," says Andrew Lipsman, senior analyst at comScore.

"The intensity of usage with conversational media sites is unique to the Internet," Lipsman adds, with heavy visitors to conversational media sites in particular exhibiting certain niche online behaviors that can be underrepresented in a general consumer panel.

That fact inspired creation of the new tool to measure the intensity and predict the velocity and magnitude of its growth.

Federated Media Publishing, the Sausalito, Calif.-based advertising platform for blogs, lent comScore its expertise on the consumer population that visits blogs, contributes commentary to blogs and social networks, and offers advertisers a stickier relationship.

Drawing upon comScore's panel of 2 million consumers (who have given comScore permission to track and analyze their Internet browsing and transaction behavior), the comScore Conversational Media report will provide advertisers with a new kind of knowledge to help them improve their marketing strategies and tactics.

Among comScore's clients are AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Best Buy, ESPN, Nestlé, the United States Postal Service, Verizon and Merck. The firm will not say which advertisers have signed up for the new monthly syndicated report.

Federated's input helps comScore accurately project data from its panel members to the total population of blog readers and respondents. Media agencies, online publishers, blog authors and networks, and independent content providers gain a reliable and timely gauge of consumer adoption of conversational sites.

The metrics in Conversational Media are standard to other comScore reports and include unique visitors, page views and time spent.

However, this audience measurement tool will help advertisers that in general are spending more on online media better allocate their marketing dollars across Web properties and subchannels.

"The whole space is evolving," Lipsman says of the Internet and media buys on it. "This product won't change the marketing message of advertisers as much as the product categories that advertise on blogs and niche content sites."

comScore preceded its launch with extensive quality assurance tests of log data from leading conversational media publishers. The validated data set was used as the benchmark by which the observed online behavior in the conversational media category was projected.

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