Yahoo has a message for any ecommerce marketers who were spooked by the latest Web traffic figures from online metrics firm comScore.
The company announced this week that comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR) had under-reported Yahoo's (NASDAQ: YHOO) U.S. page views in June by more than a billion, and the amount of time users spent on its sites by some 850 million minutes.
Those are big discrepancies in important raw metrics -- eyeballs and engagement -- for ecommerce marketers and other Internet advertisers to consider when dividing up their online ad budgets. And comScore's monthly usage stats are among the most widely cited of any Web analytics firm.
Since comScore normally does not restate its figures once they are published, Yahoo decided to issue its own press statement to explain the discrepancies, and to make a show of confidence in comScore going forward.
"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," said CEO Carol Bartz.
"We believe comScore is committed to addressing the error and ensuring accurate and reliable reporting of marketplace performance," she added.
For its part, comScore posted a blog entry explaining that the problem was confined to Yahoo reporting only.
"The Yahoo case is a regrettable error which was the result of processing specific to Yahoo. As such, it was an isolated, one-time error that did not affect any other client's data," Linda Abraham, executive vice president of Yahoo marketing and global development, said in a post to the company's blog.
In its statement, Yahoo said that in June, it actually served up 37.843 billion page views in the U.S. -- 3 percent more than the 36.749 billion comScore had reported. Likewise, Yahoo's duration figures for the U.S. came in at 39.71 billion minutes, as opposed to 38.842 billion minutes reported, or a gain of 2.2 percent over what comScore originally reported.
"Once we are satisfied that the revised metrics are correct, we post them in the Client Notification Center, an equivalent of software 'release notes' that compile any known issues for the month," Abraham said. "Clients can use the postings to report the corrected metrics in internal and external communications."
The under-reporting gaffe comes at a sensitive time for comScore. In recent months, some financial analysts have taken issue with the way that comScore counts "slide show" features that Microsoft and Yahoo have recently implemented for their search engines.
It's still too early to tell, though, whether the errors will affect prices paid by search advertising buyers.
Is Turnabout Fair Play?
If Yahoo won a victory by setting the record straight on comScore's traffic statistics, it suffered a major setback overseas.
In a surprise move, Yahoo Japan -- a separate, publicly traded company in Japan of which Yahoo owns 35 percent -- announced Tuesday that it will let Google provide its underlying search infrastructure in a deal somewhat similar to the arrangement that Microsoft has with Yahoo.
"Today, Yahoo Japan Corporation announced that it has decided to change its search engine and advertising platform to Google Inc. We also determined to provide data regarding our contents to Google," Yahoo Japan said in a statement (available in PDF format here).
A Yahoo spokesperson in the U.S. pointed out that the Japanese company makes its own decisions.
Given the large investment that Microsoft is making in implementing its 10-year deal with Yahoo to provide search and advertising infrastructure to Yahoo sites in exchange for a portion of the revenues, the software giant was none too pleased with Yahoo Japan's revelation.
"Today Google accounts for about 51 percent of paid search advertising in Japan [while] Yahoo Japan accounts for 47 percent [and] their combined share of natural search results is almost as high," Dave Heiner, Microsoft deputy general counsel, said in a post to the Microsoft On the Issues blog Tuesday afternoon.
"Google's plan would cement its position as essentially the sole provider of search results in Japan for years to come," Heiner added.
He acknowledged, however, that it may already be too late to challenge the deal, pointing out that Google said that the Japanese Federal Trade Commission has okayed the partnership.
At a time when Microsoft and Yahoo are nearly ready to begin transitioning U.S. and Canadian search users to Microsoft's Bing and adCenter technologies, Yahoo distanced itself from the Japanese agreement.
"This decision by Yahoo Japan does not impact the global rollout and implementation of the Yahoo search alliance with Microsoft, except in the Japanese market," the Yahoo spokesperson said in an email to InternetNews.com. "We remain confident in our transition plans for the search alliance, are driving innovation in the user experience around search on the Yahoo network, and continue to be committed to our alliance with Microsoft."
A spokesperson for Google declined to comment for this report.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.
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