OPA Releases White Paper on Local Market Data

By: E&P Staff The Online Publishers Association (OPA) has released a white paper analyzing and evaluating online audience measurement products that capture and report local market data.

"Locally-targeted ad spending is rapidly increasing as the use of local Web sites and their services expands, making the need for accurate and detailed measurement of local online audiences critically important," Michael Zimbalist, president of the Online Publishers Association, said in a statement announcing the findings. "The intent of this paper is to provide an overview of the current 'state of the art' in local audience measurement so that marketers can evaluate the various services more objectively."

To conduct its analysis, the OPA looked at data for three different local markets or Designated Market Areas (DMAs*) from five major measurement services. The five services evaluated included comScore Media Metrix, Nielsen//NetRatings' MegaView Local and @Plan, Scarborough Research, and The Media Audit. (Nielsen//NetRatings and Scarborough Research are partially owned by E&P parent company, VNU).

The local markets or DMAs used in the analysis were Los Angeles, Orlando and Kansas City. The analysis included data on locally based sites for the relevant local markets or DMAs, in addition to data on national sites such as Yahoo! and Google when there was a statistically significant local audience reported for those sites. The OPA also analyzed demographic data, such as gender and age, in each market.

While the estimated number of visitors reported varied widely between all of the services, the relative ranking of sites across methods and vendors was generally consistent, the report found.

A full version of the white paper can be downloaded from the OPA's Web site at www.online-publishers.org.