Compete.com Announces Attention-Based Web Metrics
Posted on April 3rd, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I was on the phone with a new acquaintance today, deeply immersed in our second finishing-each-others sentences discussion, when at some point the conversation skimmed over Boston-based Compete. Catching up on the Compete blog tonight, I came across this:
Today we announce that you can use Compete.com to measure a site’s Attention. Attention fuses engagement (measured by time) and traffic (measured by unique visitors) into a single, more complete picture of a web site’s value.
Today’s Enhancements:
- Attention: Introduction of the only attention-based web metrics
- Daily Data: Monitor site performance on a daily basis
- Velocity: Compare the relative growth of your site to another property
- Visits: Analyze the popularity of a site not only by how many people access it, but also how often they “visit�
- Embeddable Graphs: Easily embed Compete graphs on your web site
Compete appears to be heading in the right direction when it comes to monitoring what we’re paying attention to online. It’s still early days as we move past pageviews (just think 3D clickstream tracking in SecondLife), and I’m glad to see Compete and Quantcast and the others adding additional layers of detail to their reports. Someone on my other blog asked how Compete knows if you are a visitor or logged into a site, I’m not sure about that. One thing that did surprise me is mention of Deal Light and Coupon Mountain in the Compete FAQ.
I don’t like that you have to install toolbars and pixel beacons or Javascript to show up for these services to work. Can’t someoneborrow a few lambda on the Carnivore net?
One tweak I would make the the “why Attention is important.” First, let’s stick with a lower-case a, shall we? Second, the phrase “Where we spend our time is where we find the most value” stuck out. I recently talked about spending a lot of time at the WordPress Codex, trying to do some tricky stuff with this blog. I spent an inordinate amount of time at the Codex, mostly because I couldn’t find what I was looking for.
If it takes me a long time to find what I’m looking for, does that mean a site is high-value?
I would rather see a metric for usefulness. About.com is not useful to me for most topics, but it has good rank and a ton of visitors. This is a different measurement than trying to compare how sticky Myspace is compared to Yahoo.
Which is in itself difficult to measure because Yahoo is hundreds of sites and has 500 million registered users whereas Myspace is a single site destination with 130+ million registered users.Compete and Quantcast are going to put a dent in Comscore and Hitwise revenue, but now I have to triangulate datapoints with 5 different services. At least we’re not relying solely on Alexa anymore.