Verto Analytics, a company building a comScore competitor designed to better measure digital audiences in a world where consumers now use multiple devices, is launching its measurement service to the public. Called Verto Content Watch, the new service is designed to offer a detailed look in apps, games, websites and advertising that runs across smartphones, tablets, PCs, e-readers and other platforms.
Based in Helsinki, New York and San Francisco, Verto Analytics began three years ago by a team with extensive experience in the media measurement industry. The company has raised $8 million in outside funding to date from Conor Venture Partners and Open Ocean Capital, and today includes a handful of big-name clients including Yahoo, Cisco, EA, and Johnson & Johnson, for example.
To gather its data, Vento uses a variety of panels, and has consumers install smart meters on their devices. It also collects data from consumer-facing apps in order to track mobile app usage.
Currently, the company collects over 3,000 data points per consumer per day across their devices, and pulls in data from nearly a half billion devices monthly. Its data is then used by publishers and advertisers who access more than 100 daily metrics, which they can drill down into and filter to see things like web versus apps, categories, demographics, markets, and behavioral segments. The data allows those clients to make decisions with regard to product development, marketing, audience acquisition, and more.
This is all available from a web-based dashboard where the various metrics a client wants to track can be surfaced with just a couple of clicks.
“ComScore only tracks PC usage and sites – they’re weak on mobile,” explains Hannu Verkasalo, CEO of Verto Analytics about why his product’s data is more accurate. “Companies like Yahoo have been, over the last few years, struggling with comScore because it’s been reporting lower numbers for Yahoo than has been the real case. Mostly, that’s because comScore hasn’t been able to cover mobile,” he notes.
Meanwhile, on the mobile application front, competitors like App Annie are just now getting into usage level data for apps, but Verkasalo says the advantage of his service is that it also offers panel data, not just data pulled from the app store and various SDKs.
With the Content Watch service, the idea is that companies will now be able to reference their total audience numbers for the first time, rather than relying on measurements that largely track desktop metrics.
After five months of beta testing, the new service is now being launched to the public. It’s available as a software-as-a-service tool starting at $50,000 (up to $150K) per year, and for larger companies with more advanced data needs, the prices range from $5 to 10 million annually.