WebProNews

Compete.com has moved its Search Analytics out of private beta into a 'pay as you go' model, while ComScore introduced its Ad Metrix Publisher for advertisments. A couple of new services emerged in the competitive market for analytics information about websites. The need for greater understanding about web performance has spurred competition at all levels of the market, with Compete and comScore making plays for webmasters and their business.

ComScore has its eyes on the display advertising market in the US. Their Ad Metrix Publisher service can look at static display ads as well as the intricate rich media ads that have begun to grow in popularity.

As an example, comScore provided a look at three sports sites: ESPN, Fox Sports on MSN, and Yahoo Sports. Their assessment showed some differentiation between the trio:

While the three sites had similar ratios of males to females viewing display ads on the sites, they exhibited different skews by age and household income.

Display ads on ESPN reached the highest share of people age 35-44 (28.6 percent) and households with an income of at least $100,000 (34.7 percent).

Display ads on Fox Sports on MSN skewed heavily towards people age 45 and older (39.7 percent) and households earning between $40,000-$59,999 (31.7 percent).

Meanwhile, Yahoo! Sports fared the best at capturing the 18-34 year old demographic, with 36.5 percent of its ads reaching people in that age group.

A deeper dive into the 18-34 year old demographic revealed that Yahoo! Sports delivered the most ads to this demographic, capturing the highest share among the three sites (53.5 percent). Although advertising for all three sites reached a similar percentage of viewers within this segment, Yahoo Sports delivered about twice as many ad views.

Marketers will take note of Yahoo Sports and its performance in the heavily coveted 18-34 year old range of site visitors. Such insights will be very enticing to advertisers who want to hit that group with their marketing efforts.

At Compete, their new product looks at search marketing, and how to benefit from it. Compete touted the competitive aspects of its product, and how it helps a client look at what "the other person" is doing with keywords and search strategies.

For example, a Keyword Referrals tool shows which sites gain traffic from certain keywords. Customers purchase a number of 'credits', and redeem them on an ongoing basis to view the reports provided by Compete.

New services like these benefit webmasters, as these products drive competition to deliver better results from their product lines. With billions of dollars in online ad revenue in play each year, no one wants to flush away part of a budget that could perform better with a little more information.