UKOM goes Hybrid
From April 2012 data (published 18th May), UKOM data goes "Hybrid". We keep the benefits of people-centric measures but gain insight into audiences in “other locations” for ALL websites. This is achieved through Nielsen's tagging of a representative sample of UK sites and an industry-approved model for combining the resulting server data with traditional panels.
This means UKOM data will now include web activity in "other locations" (outside Home and Work) for the first time. The NRS online establishment survey shows that only around 3% to 4% of the total population access the Internet entirely outside home and work, but when it comes to individual websites, the proportion of their users and usage coming from other locations is typically greater than this, and growing.
Nielsen's trial Hybrid data suggests that the top 100 websites have on average 13% more users each when "other locations" are added, 18% more time spent online and 20% more page views.
The video below gives a non-technical introduction to the new data, how to access it and what the changes are likely to look like.
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The Science Behind Hybrid
Nielsen's Hybrid methodology has been several years in the making, and has already been launched in the US, Spain and Australia. It combines tag data from a select group of UK sites with traditional panel data to model all location UK audiences for every website.
The approach used is based on NBD (tech speak: negative binomial distribution). This uses audience observations from tagged sites to estimate the likelihood of cross-site visitation to untagged sites. The volume of data available is such that the accuracy of predictions should be high, and critically only a few well-chosen websites need to tag for every site to benefit from Hybrid data.
UKOM's technical staff and cross-industry Technical Group have completed a nine-month, two-stage process of first approving Nielsen's methodology in theory, and then testing its practical implementation with three months of "beta" data.
Click here to download Nielsen's technical white paper on Hybrid.
The product is delivered by Nielsen, but is subject to continuous industry oversight to ensure the numbers do what they claim. All sides of the industry (media owners, agencies and advertisers) are represented in UKOM's governance.