Computerworld published yesterday a comprehensive article about the discussion in the analytics community around the measurement of engagement.
If you read this blog on regular basis you already know what I think and if this is your first time here, you can read my quotes in the article itself.

I won’t get here to the full discussion, but I did wanted to talk about another metric that is mentioned in the article - attention.

During 2007 Nielsen and Comscore came up with their own engagement metric. For them engagement is the measurement of the time users spends on a web site or a page.
This is not engagement. This is attention. What’s the difference? There is a thin line there but I believe that attention is passive evolvement while engagement is active interactions (such as comment, posts, purchases, sharing, etc).
But put definitions aside, I also think that measuring time spent on a page, although important, can also be on of the more misleading metrics out there.
I’ll give you an example:
A few weeks ago I had to change the date of one of my flights with Delta. I went to Delta.com and it took me more than three minutes of staring on the page before I figured out how to change my flight.
If all we measured was the amount of time I spent on the page, we will probably conclude that this is a very engaging page/site with a great user experience.
In reality it was exactly the opposite. It was one of the worse user interface possible, a confusing one that just made me don’t really like the Delta brand.

Don’t get me wrong, it is still important to measure the attention metric (and we also do that at NuConomy), but you just need to be careful when you get to conclusions based on that metric alone.

Well… not exactly, but they do going to launch a new development platform that allows web sites to enhance the search results.

For example, a video site will be able to enhance the results linking to its sites by adding a preview thumbnail of the video. LinkedIn could use this to display the photo or short summery of the person in the search results.

The big hope here for Yahoo is to give web sites an incentives to send users to the Yahoo Search experience instead to Google.

I think this is a great idea from Yahoo that can give them attention and an edge in the search market.
But if they really want to be innovative and take Google down, they need to find a way to let developers to actually enhance their search algorithms.
In theory an open source search engine could enjoy the minds of thousands of developers around the world.
The big problem of course is how to deal with spammers and SEO experts if you open up your algorithm to the public.

Microsoft announced today an important new tool that will help advertisers to measure an engagement metric for their online ads.
This is a great step forward for the industry when a giant like Microsoft (that owns aQuantive and Atlas) admits that the old way of measuring impressions and clicks is just not good enough.

The new "Engagement Mapping" tool will allow you to measure the different interactions consumers had with an ad as a way to understand its effect on the buying decision.
Basically it will take into account how may times an ad was shown across sites, and hopefully also the different interaction the users had with it, when deciding on whether it contributed to the final sale.

This is a great step forward, but you probably would not be surprised if I say MS didn’t went all the way with that.
What they are missing is also the ability to tie the different interactions, across sessions, the users had inside the advertiser site to the final decision process about the ad ROI.
Even going further, the goal of an advertisers is not always a one time sale. You actually want to measure the user interaction with your brand across time.
For example: for Amazon "Acquiring" a user that will buy one item is not as valuable as a user that will register to Amazon prime and buy at least two items every week on the course of a few months.
Also, some advertisers goal is not a sale on their online shop. A social network want to get users that will not just register to the site, but will also use it as much as possible, will have many friends in their list and upload as many photos as possible.

Still, this is a welcome step forward for the Analytics and advertising industries, and it will probably start to move other companies in the same way.

People tend to say that in the web business traffic is the king. I always add, that if traffic is the king, so ROI is god.
People sometime looks at advertising as a way to drive millions of users to your web site. True, brand awareness is very important, but I will argue that in today competitive market, what you actually want is not just a lot of traffic but the right traffic.

I’ll give you an example from our life as a company. In the recent week we got great press coverage. From famous tech blogs such as Techcrunch and Read/Write web to the mainstream news sites like cnn, forbes and others. We got huge amount of traffic and more than 4000 beta requests in less than two days.
We use our own platform, NuConomy Studio, to track the different activities on our site. One of my favorites reports in the system is the one that shows you not just how much traffic you got from any referrer to your site, but which referrer contributes the most value to you.
In our case, we actually saw that the users that comes from Techcrunch were almost 5 times more value to us than the users that got to our site from the traditional media sites (which is fascinating fact when you consider that most people who register to our beta are in CXX or VP position in their companies).

Of course the big question is how do you define value?
In our case it was the combination of number of registration, request for information and actual acceptance into our beta program.
But every business has a very different kind of definition for value. If you are a blogging platform the most valuable users are probably the ones that wrote the posts that generated the highest number of views, comments, rating, shared and clicks on ads.
If you are an e-commerce site, value is probably the users that bought the most items, spend the most money, reviewed the most products, etc…

If you an advertiser, would you rather get (and pay) a  million users click on your ad, or just two hundred thousands - but the right two hundred thousands?
If you are bidding for keywords on Google ads do you want to buy the ones that generated the most clicks or the ones that brought you the most valuable users?

I personally believe that the measurement of mare traffic is something that will slowly die. Advertisers will not be satisfied with the numbers of how much hits and uniques you have. They will want to know exactly what kind of audience are engaged in your site. They will want to know exactly what kind of ROI to expect when advertising in your site.

Since declaring on another wave of beta applications, we were overwhelmed with the demand and the number of requests to our beta program.
I wanted to take the chance and personally thank everyone who took the time to register at our site. We appreciate your will to test our platform.
We are working hard on going through all the requests and get back to each of you as soon as possible.
I also wanted to thank all the people who sent us such kind words about our vision and our ideas behind the product. It’s really important for us to hear what you think.
If you don’t agree with our roadmap and where we see the industry is going to, please also talk to us. We would love to hear your thoughts and learn from that.

Again I wanted to apologize for the fact that it takes us more time to get back to you and hope you will bare with us.

"Working hard to keep up with all the beta requests"

We just announced that our A round with the WPP group. WPP is one of the two largest advertising groups in the world. All of us at NuConomy are happy to welcome our new partner.

A lot of people asked me in the last day why WPP and I thought I will share some our thoughts behind the deal.
At the DLD conference last month Mr Burda said that we are all work in the economy of attention. We really believe in that. Advertisers are constantly fighting on the attention of the consumers. Publishers are fighting on bringing users to their web site instead of their competitors.
In this economy the power the winners will be the organizations that will not just have the most accurate information about their users but the ones that will know how to translate this information into better user experience in the most efficient way.
This is our vision in NuConomy and we were happy to see that WPP shares our vision.
Like oil was the fuel behind the factories, web analytics is the fuel that powers this digital economy.
We just started to scratch the surface of the potential of using insights from web analytics to create new experiences. Web advertising still a long way to go to. We expect to see a lot of innovation in both those places and NuConomy will take a major role there.
We know that the combination of our platform with the offerings of many of WPP companies, will give customers a much more full and innovative solution.

If you have any questions I invite you to contact me here at the comments or directly at shahar at nuconomy dot com.

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.