The Canadian media industry needs better systems of measuring and analyzing digital user data if it is ever going to fully exploit emerging platforms. At least that was the consensus at IN 09: The Interactive Exchange, Interactive Ontario’s digital media conference held in Toronto in March. According to the best minds attending, Canada lags far behind the U.S. in this regard.

‘We’re still talking about successes on an anecdotal basis,’ said Claude Galipeau, newly minted as SVP digital media at Rogers Media following a cup of coffee at Astral Media and previous stints at Alliance Atlantis and CBC.

While Rogers Media is just ramping up its long-form online video – the Citytv sites offer full episodes of five scripted series, including Ugly Betty and Chuck – it also has substantial web presence around print brands such as Chatelaine magazine, including abundant lifestyle clips.

‘It’s striking to me, actually, that when you go to [the Interactive Advertising Bureau conferences] or an advertising meeting in New York, you would see the head of research with CBS or ABC or Hearst, and those people would be highly [versed] with regards to digital data and the performance of their content on emerging platforms,’ Galipeau said. ‘That’s not the case in Canada at all.’

According to Galipeau, traditional media companies are comfortable only with the metrics of the traditional TV space, and haven’t yet made the mental shift over to digital. The interactive nature of online content and the traceability of user activity may potentially provide a host of valuable information to help companies tailor their online offerings, but Galipeau believes such data is not consistently drawn upon.

Instead, he said, decisions about digital media content are made with ‘an editorial programmer-centric kind of view of these platforms.’ In other words, content is put out there because the media companies think it’s good, with little heed paid to audience response.

Some media companies feel there aren’t enough third-party Canadian suppliers of online measurement. Whereas the U.S. has comScore, Nielsen Online, Hitwise, Compete and Quantcast, north of the 49th, comScore Media Metrix Canada is the only game in town, and a couple of the panelists expressed some misgivings about relying exclusively on it.

CMM Canada monitors the online behavior of a panel of 30,000 randomly selected Internet users it says is representative of the total Canadian online population. The participants have a software meter application in their web browser that, each time they use the browser, takes them through a proxy server that captures all their clickstream data. CMM then uses the results to make projections to the total online population.

‘Let’s be clear: they don’t measure, they estimate,’ said Stephan Argent, CTV’s VP of digital media. ‘It’s a panel-based estimating system. That’s going to have inaccuracies in it.’

At his appearance at the recent CRTC hearing on broadcasting in new media, Argent brought up the industry’s concerns regarding measurement, citing the example of CTVglobemedia’s MTV. Argent claims that the station’s internal video-streaming numbers for December were nearly 700% adrift from what comScore reported.

While Argent said he would accept a margin of error around 5%, ‘when you look at a 700% margin of error… that’s not a margin of error, that’s a problem.’

Argent said the industry needs not only accurate tallying of streaming numbers, but robust demographic information as well.

‘We just don’t have the mechanisms in play,’ he added. ‘Let’s provide some really strong, detailed metrics for our advertisers in order to create the value that I think they’re looking for… We need to figure it out and figure it out quickly.’

Although there are signs of movement, Canadian advertisers have not yet embraced the online space to the same degree as those in the U.S. and some European countries, and some suggested that could be partially attributed to metrics. ‘If the [media buyers] are looking at data that is problematic with regards to what we’re seeing in terms of our performance, they won’t necessarily put us in the mix,’ Galipeau said.

In a separate interview, comScore executives provided Playback with various scenarios that could account for discrepancies between their numbers and those of their clients.

Pat Pellegrini, comScore’s VP international research, points to the flaws in the media companies’ own server-based statistics. First of all, whereas comScore’s panel-based system tracks the activity of individuals – and an individual is the accepted definition of a unique visitor – internal stats measure the activity of computers.

But one person can access a website from multiple machines in a given timeframe, which would boost a server’s count of unique visitors, as could visitors from outside the country.

Also, according to comScore, 30% of Canadian surfers regularly delete cookies on their computers, so when they return to a website, they are recounted as unique visitors. Other functions and programs including redirects, spiders and bots can trigger a particular web page automatically.

‘The highest quality information that you will get will be from a panel, because you’ll be measuring people – what people see, what people will actually react to, ads that they absorb,’ says Pellegrini.

ComScore acknowledges that it does miss some activity, including people who access sites from public locations such as Internet cafés or hotels, and those who surf at work, as many workplaces that dissuade employee surfing would be reluctant to participate.

Internal server data, on the other hand, would pick up this activity. For that reason, comScore has embarked on what it calls a panel-centric hybrid trial in Canada that it intends to roll out worldwide. It combines comScore’s panel info with filtered server data provided directly from the many niche websites that may not register on the panel results.

‘There are a lot of good things you can do with server-side measurement that you can’t do with panel measurement, and vice versa,’ says CMM Canada president Brent Bernie. ‘You can have a hammer and a screwdriver in your tool belt – you use them for different things, but they’re both valuable.’

Jonathan Lister, managing director and head of Google Canada, believes that, through services such as Google Analytics, his company already offers the kind of dynamic metrics the industry is looking for – at no cost. The problem, he said at IN 09, is that many organizations have yet to take advantage. ‘Google has thousands [of free data sources], measuring as much as you can as often as you can,’ he said.

While many companies might monitor the broadest statistics, such as website traffic, the deeper down you drill, the more actionable the information can be. Lister provided the example of bounce rate.

‘Bounce rate is the percentage of clicks that bounce off your site without ever having dignified your site with one further click,’ he explained. ‘It’s a really stark way of looking at how good your site is at a fairly high level.’

Google also offers readily available information that allows companies to gauge the performance of their competitors. ‘You can really use the data,’ Lister said. ‘It’s a huge competitive advantage because not everybody is doing it.’