• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 13, 2013

Traditional performance metrics challenges marketers for a variety of reasons. Let's start with the consumers who use multiple browsers and devices to access the Internet. They connect with brands through Web sites and apps, and most major mobile Web browsers don't accept third-party cookies. Then there are those pesky security programs deleting third-party cookies on average every seven days

The inaccuracy of current measurement models has become a major problem for digital marketers. Predictive analytics and measurement tools can override some of the inherent inaccuracies.

Trueffect created what it calls a new standard for audience-based measurement by providing a consolidated view of the data that reflects consumer performance.

Metrics also tell marketers how online gamers will behave. Los Angeles-based Ninja Metrics, a University of Minnesota spinoff that analyzes and predicts the behavior of online gamers, closed on $2.8 million in funding led by Tech Coast Angels and Harvard business School Angels.

Sony will launch PlayStation 4 Friday, followed by Microsoft Xbox One next week. The Los Angeles Times reports analysts predict both devices will sell as many as 5 million units before the end of the year.

University of Minnesota professor Jaideep Srivastava and University of Southern California associate Dmitri Williams co-founded the startup Ninja Metrics. They call the company a "social analytics engine."

Ninja's technology is built on the theory of how social networks emerged.  They explain it came from a "relatively obscure branch of nineteenth-century mathematics called graph theory that sought to understand the math of relationships." Beginning in the 1930s, and continuing through the 1950s, psychologists sociologists, and other social scientists used social mathematical developments to stop talking abstractly about social structure and began to collect data about structures of individual people and their connections to each other.