New UKOM Nielsen Hybrid launches
The new UKOM Nielsen Hybrid was officially launched to the research industry this morning at the IAB. James smythe, general manager at UKOM made it clear from the outset that this was “not just about research tinkering… It answers a specific question”.
The latest TouchPoints data shows a surprising average of five devices per household, and the core reason for the extension of the UKOM survey is to mop up data for devices other than the main PC.
Smythe explained: “The panel-based approach was working less and less well given the proliferation of devices, which made the panel less and less representative.
The hybrid data has three main benefits:
- A level playing field for planning
- Site totals including all platforms and locations
- The people centric (panel) view is retained
“Panel-based people centric stays at the heart,” said Smythe but now there is also server data from key tagged websites representing 53% of all users – then modelling leads to a figure being derived for every site. It will be clear to users if sites are tagged fully, partly or not at all.
Nielsen’s Andrew Bradford says the company has been working on hybrid for seven years now. He described the outcome as representative, comprehensive and consistent. Clearly the additional data increases views and users and time per page data.
The hybrid data will feed many systems and surveys including NRS (for NRS-padd); TouchPoints; and Nielsen’s own OCR, VideoCensus and Homescan products.
While the new data covers every device that contacts a web page and can fire a tag, the UKOM data cannot be split by device, but Nielsen can do this as custom analysis.
The UKOM contract changes hands in January 2013, moving from Nielsen to comScore, so there will be further challanges around adopting comScore’s hybrid data and around comparative and trends data at the point of switching.