For marketers looking to get a complete picture of consumer habits, the traditional "Nielsen household" has become somewhat antiquated considering the array of choices available in today's media landscape. That has prompted Nielsen to rethink how it monitors American households, but so far the company has hit some major roadblocks.

According to The New York Times, Nielsen hasn't been able to sell very many participants on the idea tracking web usage. That in turn prompted to Nielsen to make web tracking an optional component of its Nielsen household program.

"I'm going to go to a home and say, 'I want your TV, I want your internet, here's a cellphone you're going to use and, by the way, I want to measure your grocery purchases,'" said James M. O'Hara, president for media product leadership at Nielsen. "That's a lot."

While Nielsen tracks consumer behavior online, it hasn't been able to bring its name brand to cross-platform measurement. Earlier this week, Nielsen canceled its plan to combine data from TV and radio because too few clients were willing to pay for the results. However, Nielsen still insists that its future rests with its Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement project, which aims to track media consumption patterns of the same users on any platform.