• April 25, 2008

ComScore President and CEO Magid Abraham published a letter Thursday regarding comScore's domestic paid-click data on Google. Abraham stands by the accuracy of comScore paid-click data in the face of some financial and media analysts writing that comScore's reports of slowing growth in Google's paid clicks missed the mark.

"That conclusion is patently false," Abraham said. "Unfortunately, many pundits attempted to draw conclusions about Google's worldwide revenue performance based on comScore's domestic paid-click data, resulting in an apples-to-oranges comparison. Had they used comScore's domestic paid-click data to better understand Google's domestic revenue trends, they wouldn't have missed an important U.S. story and they also likely would have avoided making the wrong call on Google's worldwide business."

Following several historical quarters of strong sequential domestic revenue growth (including the seasonally equivalent first quarter 2007), Google's first-quarter 2008 revenue growth was essentially flat--which represented a significant change for Google's domestic business, he said.

"There is, of course, a lesson to be learned here," he wrote. "To extrapolate a single data point across all aspects of a company's business can lead to wildly inaccurate conclusions. Finally, to confirm the accuracy of the comScore paid-click data, we previously published an apples-to-apples reconciliation. This analysis reconciles the comScore data with metrics shown in Google's Q1, 2008 financial report. In short, comScore got it right--both quantitatively and qualitatively. What was wrong were the conclusions that some people drew based on inherently flawed comparisons."

--Tanya Irwin