A recent post in Occem’s Razor claims that we can’t measure users’ engagement using web analytics tools.
Although I’m a big fan of this blog, I got to say that this time I disagree with the conclusions in this post.
Avinash and Theo claims that the reason we can’t measure engagement is that we can’t differentiate between positive and negative engagement.
I think they are right to some degree. It’s true that if you only look at criteria such as number of visits, recency and depth of visit you won’t really understand engagement.
But that’s exactly why we in NuConomy decided to offer a different way to measure engagement.
Engagement is not just how many pages I’ve seen in a site. It is about how engaged I am in the brand and activities of the site.
Engagement is the combination of all of the user interactions in the site. It could go from purchases, media uploads, ratings to comments, share with friends and many other things.
Let’s take an example:
User A, goes into YouTube. He goes through a few channels and user pages. He browse about 30 pages which brings him deep into the site, but he doesn’t watch even a single video.
User B goes into YouTube. He watch the top 5 videos in the home page. He rate 3 of them and make comments on the other two. He than continue to upload two videos of its own. During all this time, he doesn’t browse more than 5 pages in the site.
Now - Which of the users do you think is more engaged with the YouTube brand?
This kind of measurement is exactly what’s in the heart of our product NuConomy Studio. We let you measure all kind of user interactions, and even combine them to get a definite "engagement" rank to each of your users or content pieces.
It’s true that even than we can’t be certain about the how much a user love the brand, but we believe it brings you very close to that.
Techcrunch just announced that Virgin America will start to broadcast Revision3 shows like Diggnation on their airplanes.
This is another major win for web video that shows that web video is not just about taking TV shows and put them on the web, but also about great content produced first for the web.
Even more interesting is the fact that the original ads that appear in the shows on the web will also be used on the flights. Will this push more mainstream advertisers into video ads?
Personally I always claimed that the real revolution is not about the big studios making their shows available on the web, but about web content going out of the web into the old mediums like the radio, newspapers and TV.
Think about it - The best articles and audio shows are already in blogs and podcasts. Why can’t we consume them in the old media (that lets face it, it is still more convenient in a lot of situations)?
All of us who deal with web advertising and analytics are facing serious privacy issues. This is a constant struggle between the need of advertisers to know as much as possible about the user, and the need of the users to keep their privacy.
When you read the blogs and articles around this issue, you can imagine that privacy is a primary concern of most of the Internet users.
But is this really true?
IN one of the panels in the DLD conference I heard a very interesting idea.World demographic data shows that most of the people in the world are between the ages 16 and 34 (not to mention that these age group is probably behind the vast amount of web commerce). This fact means that in just a few years most of the people in the world will be among those who don’t even remember a world without Internet.
I got to admit that even me, although I remember how the web first looked, can’t really remember how I managed to do things before that. Can you truly remember how life was before you had email?
With his fact in mind, I got to wonder if privacy is that big of an issue for most people. While my parents are reluctant to even post a picture on the web, most kids today are happily posting all of their photos, videos, relationship status and their life stories into the web.
I don’t have accurate data, but I will bet that if someone have done a research on that we would have seen that most of those kids stay with the default public status, not making their data private.
So maybe for this new generation, it’s not privacy that is the main issue, but more of what do advertisers do with this information. As long as they don’t feel that you abuse their trust, as long as they feel that they get better web experience because of the use of this information, they will gladly share it with the rest of the world.
This week in the DLD Hubert Burda said that their business is attention. Basically all advertisers are in this business - how you attract the attention of the consumers to your customer’ product?
As any manager knows, in order to manage a successful business you got to be able to measure yourself very accurately. So the question of course is - if you are in the attention business, how do you measure the attention of the users?
This is a huge question that many companies are trying to answer these days. We at NuConomy think that we have a very unique answer to this question, but of course there are also other companies who came up with their own solution for this.
2007 was the year that basically everyone agreed that it’s about time to stop just counting on page views numbers and fins some new metric. Some call it attention, some call it engagement. No matter what’s the name, the idea behind it is to better understand how the user actually interact with web sites. Meaning, not just the pages he visits but also his interaction inside those pages.
Although companies such as us and others are already offers some solutions to this new measurement needs, big advertisers still have to deal with two major problems:
The first is the fact that there is still no standard to this new metric. And if there is no standard, you can’t compare yourself to your competitors or even between different campaigns across different ad networks, sites and platforms.
The second problem is how to correlate attention data from the real world, to the attention data collected in the digital one. If you deploy campaigns in the web, TV and billboards, how can you track a person activities on the web and in the bricks and walls shop and understand this is the same person.
I don’t believe 2008 will bring us the answer to the second question, but as for the first I will guess that by the end of the year, we will get see emerging new standards and terms coming from the IAB.
For the first post in our new blog, I wanted to address one of the issues I think are most important in today advertising world.
If you’ve been to a long term relationship, you know that one of the most important things is to know how to listen. No, I don’t mean to look like you listen while still watching the game on TV, but to really listen and understand the needs of your partner.
Unfortunately many advertisers don’t understand that although there is no sex in the end, they are still also in a relationship with their customers.
In this hilarious video Microsoft pin point this crucial problem - most advertisers keeps telling us what they think we want to hear instead of listening to what we really want and need. And yes, if we all just stop for a second and really listen we will find out that our users are telling us what they want all the time in many different ways.
Advertisers need to stop the race of page views and unique. These metrics simply don’t tell you the all story. It doesn’t tell you anything about the users’ needs and intentions. The industry should adopt a new model of engagement that will show how users are interacting with brands and ads and how engaging their experience was.
The ads themselves should become much more interactive and allow information to go two ways. Ask users what they want and you’ll be surprised how many of them will take the time to answer.
And of course ads should get much more relevant. How many times you watched a video on the web and had to sit and watch four commercials for baby food when you don’t have a baby?
In the last year behavioral targeting technologies got better, but we still have a long way to go to make it really work. Again, in order to make targeting better, we need to be able to listen to the user in much more than just recording the pages he visited.
In a world where advertising takes a bigger and bigger role in our life, advertisers need to wake up before it will be too late, because like in relationships, trust is something that is very hard to win after you lose it.
I’m happy to announce that we were chosen to take part in the upcoming Israel Web Tour.
The Israeli Web Tour takes 15 Israeli startups for a 3 day tour in the valley. During this time the companies get a chance to meet top of the line VC as well as companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo. The highlight of the tour is the showcase, where the companies get a chance to demo their products in front of a big audience.
I know many of the companies that will be there with us, and if you have the time, I highly recommend you to come the the showcase and watch them as some of them will demo their products for the first time.
