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So, how does Efficient Frontier collect the additional data? Hitwise sits in the middle of the traffic (not at the client-end, not at the server-end - but in the middle - at the ISPs) and therefore does not need any panel based collection approach. It does not appear from their website that EF sits in the middle of the traffic, so how does it get "more" data?

Anand Rajaraman

Think of the SEM ecosystem as a big pipe: at one end are advertisers, at the other end Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. EF manages the accounts of some of the largest advertisers, amounting to a statistically significant fraction of Google ad revenues. Also, EF's clients are worldwide, not just US, so they have a great sample of the overall search advertising revenue stream flowing into Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

The nice thing, EF has both the bid data (dollars and cents), as well as the ad clickthrough data. Hitwise, comScore, etc can measure only clickthrough data; they don't know the value of each click.


This is a great analysis ... can you provide a similar analysis of AdGooroo's research report which indicated that advertisers were coming back to Google? This report was released about a day before earnings and (to me at least) indicated an earnings surprise may have been in the works.


What would be really interesting is to put together a model with all of these different data points and try to predict their revenues 10-15 days before earnings. You'd have a least one more avid reader if you did that...!


Have you seen this interesting response from Comscore?


There is a still a fair amount of discrepancy between Comscore's US numbers (-9%) vs. Googles (0%), but the gap is smaller. Of course, your overall point is still valid though - Comscore didn't have non-US data while EF did which turned out to be pretty useful. In any case, I dont trust many of these panel approaches either! On the TV ratings measurement side, TiVo is trying to upset Nielsen's TV ratings by collecting data from lot more people (TiVo users) and at finer granularity. (Disclosure: I worked on that project at TiVo).

Anand Rajaraman

Srinivas, thanks for the pointer. I'll take a look and post an update.

david solomon

I totally agree with Scott ...that would be some real great piece of help if you could do that !

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