Entries Tagged 'Attention' ↓

A couple of days ago I had an interesting conversation about the differences between intent and interest as it applies to targeting ads.
Google is a huge business because they run the biggest “intent engine” in the world. Millions of people are going to Google every day and effectively state their current intent.
If you search for “XBOX Price” Google assumes that you intend to buy an XBOX.
The question is - Is intent all you need in order to target ads for users in the most efficient way?

I argue that the answer is no. Search is a great indicator for intent, but often enough it is not a good indicator for interest.
If you look at Google Trends you can see that a lot more users are searching for the term “Music” than the term “Britney Spears” although Britney is one of the more popular search terms. Same results if we compare the term “Movies” to “Batman” or “The Dark Knight” which was the most popular movie of the year.
We see the same thing in fashion searches as well as gaming.

When people want to buy something, they search for the exact phrase. This is why Google is a great platform for direct marketers who want to “catch” users just before they decide to buy something. But if you want to target users by their long term interests, search is not the best and definitely not the only place you need to put your money.
For example, take people who search for music. They get to iTunes, Rhapsody or any of the other music services and that’s it. Now for the next year, they will get all their music needs there. If you want to target ads for the some of your artists, how do you know which users tend to like each music genre?
Even if you use the user search data you may draw the wrong conclusions. Maybe I searched for Madonna just in order to buy a present to a friend. But if you will know which music I listened to for the past year, you can really conclude what types of music and artist I like and which ones I might like in the future.

This is the still untapped promise of behavioral targeting - the ability to go from intent to interest. It is especially suited for brand advertisers. Unlike direct marketers, brand advertisers want to reach a certain profile of users. The purpose of these campaigns is to build a long term relationship with the user and not a one night stand.
For example, they want to reach the users who are really engage into business and not the ones who looked for stocks right now because it is the main item in the news. They want to reach the real fashion enthusiasts and not the ones who searched for a dress because it’s prom night. They want to know your interests and not just what you want to buy or do today.

Now, to be fair, search could also give you indicators about interest. If every day for a few months I will search for keywords involving financial terms, we can assume that it is part of my interests. But the question is, how many people use search like that? Don’t most people search for something a couple of times, find the sites they need, bookmark them and than start to go there directly?

This is why in the long run, all these social networks, blogging and video sites might have a very bright future. While Google is sitting on today gold mine of intent data, they might be holding to the gold mine of tomorrow - the user interests data.

Read/Write web came out with a story today that try to show that Yahoo Buzz got bigger than Digg.
The data that the article is based on is new Comscore data that shows that Yahoo Buzz did passed Digg in the number of uniques.

If you consider just the traffic numbers, indeed it seems that Digg are in big troubles. But a quick look at Yahoo Buzz and Digg home pages will show you a very different picture.

On the Yahoo Buzz home page, the most voted story has 118 votes. Most other stories has less than 30. At the same time, Just by taking a quick look you can see that most stories on Digg home page have more than 300 diggs (votes).
It even get worse for Yahoo Buzz if you go to the tech section where most stories have just about 2 - 30 votes. Even if you look at all stories from the last 24 hours and not just recent hours, the picture stays the same.

So yes, Yahoo Buzz is leveraging the Yahoo home page to build a big reach. But sometimes it’s not about quantity - it’s about quality. Digg users are much more loyal to the Digg brand. Their engagement in the site is much higher. Yahoo Buzz users are more likly to skip to the next hot site, as they are less emotionally invested than the Digg users. There is much more chance that they will stay loyal to the site on the long run. I will even argue that their value to advertisers can be higher (put demographics aside as I don’t know Digg data) as their digital participation is higher.

This is a great example why by looking just on page views and uniques we can get a very disturbed picture of reality. This is exactly why attention and engagement metrics are so important to the future of the web.

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.

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.