Compete.com keeps getting better and better – did you know Compete Now Offers Audience Insights! You can get the information on most of the larger sites but not on very small websites where there isn’t enough information.  You can also get Audience breakdowns by demographics according to the Compete.com blog:

..Compete Audience Profiles are available to anyone with a free MyCompete account on compete.com. See an example of some of the attributes you’ll see when using Compete Audience Profiles below.

However, in order to get Audience Profile data to show up each website that wants it must claim ownership and place a JavaScript sending data to Compete.com so it can capture this information -and it just might be worth doing and seems to overlap some of what Quantcast does by collecting much of the same information.

You can read about the details in the Compete Now Offers Audience Insights! post but rather than repeat the same information they offered, I’m going to use Compete to look at something different, like proving a Social Media casestudy works or not – not sure the information is granular enough though.

But the Demographics and Age-Income information is good enough to tell us something about Twitter

The early adopters who used Twitter had more money – but as time has gone on, Twitter is going mainstream and this chart above shows it (though the ages of Twitter users didn’t change much over the last two years).

I generally use tools like Compete to confirm or deny assumptions or hypothesis that I have.    If it’s just about driving attention to a site, the daily attention and daily time spent are better – but if your looking to see how changes you have made have broadly changed your audience, Compete is you friend – and a better friend than Comscore – which is much, much more expensive – but doesn’t offer much more in this respect.

If Compete were to offer their Industry and Behavioral profiles to everyone AND cover the entire world, they’d have, more or less, the same thing as Comscore MyMetrix – but they would need a lot more granularity.

It just goes to show that the bar keeps getting higher – and Comscore and Nielsen ought to be happy they have companies like Compete and Quantcast to keep them innovating and getting better – because if they didn’t,  there would not be much value in Comscore or Nielsen, which is more focused on paid advertising, anyway.

But, as I wrote a few years ago, the value of all these tools, Compete, Quantcast, Comscore, Nielsen, etc, is to foster conversations in a safe way between brands and competitors – they should not be taken as absolute truths – more as trending tools for insight.

Anyhow, Great job for Compete – they continue to raise the bar – and I’m looking forward to the next release which I understand was going to be next month.

Thanks to a new research study from comScore, GroupM Search & M80 exploring how Social Media and Paid Search Interact we learn Social Media can improve Paid Search Performance for a brand by up to 300% (see the study, embedded below).
The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption

I’ve been thinking, for a while, Social Media isn’t just a marketing channel – it’s a mode of communications, perhaps part of all the other marketing channels, much like a co-enzyme Q 10, that helps cellular respiration by supporting the rest of the body’s metabolic processes.   In fact, when I was a Board Director at the Web Analytics Association, who founded the Social Media Committee, it became clear, after the first year of the committee’s existence – Social Media supports Research, Advocacy, Marketing, Communications – often making them all work better.

And that’s what the ComScore-GroupM study shows -

Studies like this are great – they seem to reinforce common sense – and give us an idea of what we might expect when leveraging Search and Social Media, together.  Common Sense – the more a touchpoint is “nurtured” and fed with information relevent to the search query (by Social Media – especially social media that’s about the brand or term being searched for) the more likely a searcher is going to click through to the search campaign’s landing page – almost 50% more likely – once exposed to Social Media.

And, the searcher who is exposed to Social Media is also more likely to stay online longer – as the chart above, shows (72 minutes with Paid Search Alone vs 170 minutes with Paid Search AND Influenced Social Media).  However, I want to point out time spent online isn’t necessarily time spent on the Brand’s site – plus this study comes from ComScore – which mainly uses Panel Data and extrapolates it to a much larger population, and therefore isn’t 100% accurate.

The so-called  “co-enzyme” effect of Social Media is further amplified in that Consumers using social media are 1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a list of brands or products to consider purchasing compared to the average Internet user.

One other thing I’m reminded of while writing this post – that typical Paid Search operates as “interruption” media just as most other advertising still does.  The other day, I stood waiting for a bus and someone approached me, wanting to give me leaflet – I wasn’t interested – while another person, nearby, accepted the leaflet.

Now, most of the time I don’t like people just coming up to me and asking for my attention – the lady next to me, took the leaflet offered, and immediately went over to the nearby garbage can, and threw it out.    How many times is that repeated – probably 99% of the time – which explains why a paid search ad is clicked on less than 1% of the time, on average – not to mention other forms of media that fare even worse.   It’s almost as if, we, having become so exposed to media and brand messages, have tuned out – and don’t want to be interrupted – but we still want to be marketed to – just not in the same way.

Taking it another level – we often get to learn more, lower our barriors in social activity – talking and relating to one another, or a brand we’re considering buying from – it seems to me, we can’t ignore that we need to have a conversation -but that conversation needs to be about something – something interesting to us.

So the The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption tells us that……. we need to think of Social Media, not as a channel, by itself, but the fabric which connects all the other things we do – and amplifies them.   By having this level of communication Brands will have to improve their offerings and find out what people want, and respond, creating relevant conversations, but not doing so – means, missing the boat – and perhaps, cutting your sales by 200%-300% of what they could be … and if that’s not a strong example of Social Media ROI, I don’t know what is.

This is pretty good news and something I wanted to happen for a while – Comscore has pretty good categorization of audiences into Audience Segments, but their measurement technology, panel based, is often inaccurate.  Omniture, and Web Analytics, in general – measure traffic well enough – but have no method to analyze audience.   But that is about to change – today.

The alliance with Comscore along with Omniture’s acquisition by Adobe show the “convergence” I’ve been talking about where analytics, social media, search, content creation and management – is hastening – speeding up – forcing profound changes in how we’re going to measure and roll out information and services, perhaps, faster than we think.

According to an article today in Tagagana.com ….

ComScore, Omniture join up to measure digital audiences

“….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.

The two companies hope to address that by giving Web content creators and advertisers a consistent set of numbers.

By joining forces, Omniture and comScore could also shed new insights into digital audiences. For example, comScore’s panel may not fully represent the proportion of Macintosh users out there, and those users tend to visit video Web sites at a higher frequency than their PC counterparts, comScore CEO Magid Abraham said. Omniture’s server-based data collection could track a visit regardless of the computer or device used.

Omniture, meanwhile, doesn’t have demographic data on the users visiting, and it couldn’t tell that the same person visited both Facebook and MySpace, for instance. That’s where comScore comes in.

James said the timing of the announcement near the Adobe acquisition was just a coincidence. The deal, which is expected to close by November, will combine Omniture’s services for figuring how to best deliver messages and Internet advertisements with Adobe’s tools for creating these Web sites and ads.”