NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - January 07, 2015) - Ghostery today announced the Ghostscore Website Optimization Index™, a data-driven engine that ranks website performance and security across key industries worldwide -- establishing a new global standard for website efficiency and profitability.
The Ghostscore Index ranks leading brands across key industries: Finance, Insurance, Publishing, Retail, Search/Internet and Travel, based on website effectiveness and results. The far-reaching index is creating a first-of-its-kind benchmark for companies to assess their own progress in better managing website performance and security.
According to Ghostery's new index, Capital One, Delta Airlines, Pinterest, Amazon, Comcast and Southwest Airlines are the top brands consistently maximizing the returns from their investments in digital marketing technology while advancing website security initiatives, protecting customer data and improving site speed.
Among retailers, Macy's jumped to the top ranking in December, timed with the holiday season. Five sites were consistently in the top 10 performers for the last four months: Amazon, Sainsburys, Etsy, Best Buy and Home Depot:
Full results can be viewed at the www.ghostery.com/ghostscore.
The Ghostscore Website Optimization Index evaluates how companies are managing their marketing cloud -- the interconnected web of ad networks, social media widgets, data analytics tools and more from thousands of vendors that power online engagement. In addition, the Ghostscore Index assesses the impact on the user experience of factors such as the number of third-party vendors with access to a website, the number of digital vendors encountered per webpage, and the site's tag deployment logic.
The insights from the Ghostscore Index allow companies to measure and assess their operational risks while creating standards for keeping customer data safe, minimizing security vulnerabilities and improving website performance. By doing so, companies can boost the benefits of digital marketing while greatly minimizing the risk.
"We created Ghostscore to address the need for an industry benchmark to help organizations compare their own websites against others that are creating industry best practices," said Ghostery CEO Scott Meyer. "As companies become increasingly aware of the vulnerabilities associated with cloud-based digital marketing, the Ghostscore index delivers a way for any site to quickly evaluate their website risks, set priorities and drive increased ROI from their vendors and websites."
The Ghostscore Index is based on anonymous data from more than 20 million Ghostrank consumers who have opted-in to share information with Ghostery about their online experiences. This data is aggregated across a range of websites from around the world including retail/e-commerce, banking and financial services, travel, search/internet and publishing sites. This massive library of real-world data delivers a new level of market intelligence that has been previously unavailable.
The Ghostscore Index evaluates five areas:
| Security | The total number of non-secure tag calls encountered on secure pages, per 1,000 pages viewed. | |
| Total Vendors in the Marketing Cloud | The number of distinct vendors that appear on the domain in the month for which the score is generated. | |
| Total Vendors Encountered per Page | Average number of tags loaded per page across all pages on the domain with 3 or more tags found per page load. | |
| Tag Deployment Ratio | The ratio of average tags per page encountered on the domain, divided by total tags encountered. | |
| Performance | The average latency of all tags encountered by Ghostrank contributors on a domain. | |
Ghostery recently announced its Marketing Cloud Management (MCM) solution and TrackerMap at the DEMO 2014 show, winning a prestigious DEMO God award for delivering a new level of transparency for companies to uncover all the third-party code on their websites. Using MCM, companies can clean up, speed up and lock down their websites and match the industry Ghostscore leaders.
About Ghostery, Inc.
Ghostery empowers consumers and businesses to expose and eliminate digital blind spots in the Marketing Cloud -- the collection of digital technologies that power, measure, socialize, and optimize websites and apps. Over 40 million people globally rely on the free Ghostery browser extension to see and control the technologies that follow them online. Businesses rely on Ghostery Marketing Cloud Management to drive ROI by maximizing the security, performance, and profitability of their digital assets Key clients like Equifax, Intercontinental Hotels Group and Procter & Gamble depend on Ghostery to take their digital business from chaos to control.
Ghostery also is the dominant provider of privacy governance services globally, powering compliance for more than $2 billion of advertising and e-commerce transactions annually. Founded in 2009, Ghostery has headquarters in New York City with offices in San Francisco, Salt Lake City and London. The company is backed by Warburg Pincus, LLC, the global private equity fund. Learn more at Ghostery.com and @ghosteryinc.
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Contact Information:
Communications Contacts:
US:
Rebecca Mettler
Ghostery
914-215-0113
rmettler@ghostery.com
UK/EU:
Victoria Usher
Gingermay Marketing
+44 7971 129104
victoria@gingermaymarketing.com
