Online measurement firm comScore eyes UAE

ComScore, the international online measurement company, told Emirates Business that it is considering the possibilities of expanding into the UAE and the region.

Responding to a query from this newspaper, Berit Block, European Press and Events Analyst, comScore, said: "The Middle East, including the UAE, are on comScore's radar."

Although he did not provide any clear timeline, Block added: "We acknowledge that there is a growing market in this region and there is a need for good measurement practices."

The international measurement company had earlier declined to provide any statistics from the region on the basis that it had no presence in the Middle East. A major client of comScore, Microsoft, recently launched a full-fledged marketing team in the region, to focus on the growing business opportunities.

Aubrey Edwards, General Manager, Consumer and Online International, Microsoft, said: "We don't have any public information on this market's breakdown, because essentially comScore does not have the data for the region.

"Generally from an advertising perspective, one of the challenges that we face in our small and emerging markets is the quality of data and access to it. So we don't have a good go on specific details, I am afraid. However, we are discussing how we will continue to help get better measurement as an industry, not only as Microsoft."

Meanwhile, comScore is working on developing its search analysis methods, with the revisions proposed to be implemented in the third quarter of 2010, according to Cameron Meierhoefe, Executive Vice-President, Analytics at comScore.

ComScore recently released its monthly comScore search analysis of the US search marketplace.

According to the results, both Yahoo and Microsoft sites have experienced gains due in part to the continued utilisation of contextual search approaches that tie content and related search results together.

Google sites led the US core search market in May with 63.7 per cent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo sites at 18.3 per cent with an increase of 0.6 percentage points, and Microsoft sites achieving 12.1 per cent with an increase of 0.3 percentage points.

Network captured 3.6 per cent of the search market, followed by AOL with 2.3 per cent. Compared to April, Google has lost 0.7 per cent of its share in search last month. The report also shows that Americans conducted 15.9 billion searches in May, up three per cent from April. Google sites accounted for 10.2 billion searches showing an increase of two per cent, followed by Yahoo with 2.9 billion searches up by six per cent, Microsoft sites with 1.9 billion searches corresponding to a six per cent increase.

Edwards said earlier Microsoft would be focusing on evolving a search engine to a decision engine, allowing users to receive more relevant data and information.

Meierhoefer wrote on comScore blog about the impact of the recent developments in search technology on search measurement. "The recent innovation deployed by a number of search engines is to go beyond simply providing a search box along with content, but to weave their search engines into the user experience."

"By providing search results that are highly relevant to the content being consumed by a user, properties like MSN and Yahoo can provide intuitive and convenient content discovery experiences. Also, by providing search results in context across their network, those sites are able to leverage the size of their audience to expose more users to their search services," he said.

"The continued evolution of search and emerging innovations in how it is used to enhance user experience, calls for a thoughtful review of how we classify various types of searches, count them and report them. While we will maintain the current method through the end of the second quarter to avoid disruptions, we will aim to implement proposed revisions in the third quarter," said Meierhoefer.

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