comScore Earnings Preview

Investors braced for a bumpy ride ahead of comScore's (Nasdaq: SCOR  ) earnings announcement as the company has wavered between beating and falling short of analyst predictions during the past fiscal year. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Wednesday. comScore provides a digital marketing intelligence platform that helps customers make better-informed business decisions and implement more effective digital business strategies.

What analysts say:

• Buy, sell, or hold?: The majority of analysts back comScore as a buy. But with 85.7% of analysts rating it a buy, comScore is still below the mean analyst rating of its nearest nine competitors, which average 92.5% buys. Analysts don't like comScore as much as competitor Arbitron overall. Four out of four analysts rate Arbitron a buy compared to six of seven for comScore. While analysts still rate the stock a moderate buy, they are a little more optimistic about it compared to three months ago.
• Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $58.4 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a rise of 27.8% from the year-ago quarter.
• Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is a loss of $0.25 per share. Estimates range from a loss of $0.39 to a loss of $0.07.

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are solidly backing the stock with 93.9% awarding it an outperform rating. The community at large backs the All-Stars with 85.7% assigning it a rating of outperform. Fools have embraced comScore, though the message boards have been quiet lately with only 50 posts in the past 30 days. comScore's bearish CAPS rating of two out of five stars falls short of the Fool community sentiment.

Management:
The company's gross margin shrank by 3.7 percentage points in the last quarter. Revenue rose 38.4% while cost of sales rose 56% to $19.3 million from a year earlier.

Now let's look at how efficient management is at running the business. Traditionally, margins represent the efficiency with which companies capture portions of sales dollars. The following table shows gross, operating, and net margins over the past four quarters.

Quarter	Q2	Q1	Q4	Q3
Gross Margin	66.8%	67.6%	69.8%	69.9%
Operating Margin	(10.6%)	(4.8%)	(2.6%)	(7.0%)
Net Margin	(14.2%)	(0.6%)	(1.0%)	(4.7%)

For all our comScore-specific analysis, including earnings and beyond, add comScore to My Watchlist.

Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.