14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has now revealed that comScore’s traffic numbers for June were erroneous and underreported Yahoo’s US page views and time spent on the site by a significant margin. comScore contacted Yahoo about the error last week. Both companies have now commented on the story.
The initial numbers underreported Yahoo’s page views by over one billion. The figure put forward initially was 36.749 billion page views in the US for June, but the corrected figure was 37.843 billion. This was also true for time spent on site. The initial figure was 38.842 billion minutes in total, while the corrected one was 39.710 billion. The new numbers paint a better picture for Yahoo in June with page views down only 4.7 percent from May, compared to 7.4 percent as the erroneous numbers indicated.
comScore attributed the difference to a processing error and said it identified methods to prevent it in the future. It also said it was an isolated mistake and that the data of other clients, or other Yahoo-specific numbers were not affected. Yahoo was less than pleased, but didn’t come out too aggressively.
"At Yahoo!, keeping our users highly engaged on our network is core to everything we do,” Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, said. “We issued this release because it’s important that our business partners, advertisers, and shareholders have an accurate, independent third-party measurement of our performance.”
“We believe comScore is committed to addressing the error and ensuring accurate and reliable reporting of marketplace performance. Yahoo! is fully prepared to work collaboratively with comScore to develop policies and practices to ensure the timely correction of inaccurate information,” she added.
While both companies kept the tone civilized, there is more than meets the eye to this. comScore has recently revealed that changes on Yahoo sites led to an artificial increase in search market share numbers. The analytics company will implement some changes in the way it measures searches, starting with the third quarter, to take into account the new features implemented by Yahoo.