Compete.com Announces the only Attention-Based Web Metrics
Written by TJ Mahony (contact - e-mail) -- April 2nd, 2007 | Recommend ThisFor the last few months we have made several posts using a new metric we refer to as Attention. We created our Attention metric because all of us in online marketing need a better way to gauge the influence of a site beyond unique visitors, page views and “visits”. While these are all critical pieces of the puzzle that is the web, they all also have their short comings.
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
Why is Attention Important?
- A site’s influence can be under/over stated by traditional metrics.
- There are only 24 hours in a day – our time is finite. Where we spend our time is where we find the most value.
Notice in the chart above how runescape.com only ranks 436th in unique visitors, yet based on Attention is the 15th most prominent site on the web. If we relied solely on traditional metrics we would overlook the real value and prominence of Runescape.
Above is a Velocity graph of Yelp compared to Yahoo. Although Yahoo saw a 3.8% increase in unique visitor traffic in February the percent of our Attention (e.g. time) we spend on Yahoo has decreased over the last 45 days. Yelp, on the other hand, is attracting more of our Attention every day. Being able to gauge where people’s Attention is migrating is extremely valuable in determining where we can effectively reach and engage an audience.
We wanted to thank all of our users and members for providing us the feedback and encouragement that led us to today’s release. There are over 400,000 people using Compete.com who have requested over 3,000,000 site SnapShots. We receive 10 emails a day suggesting new features/enhancements and we read every one… Thanks for helping make Compete.com the smartest site on the web!
To see the full press release of this announcement click here.
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April 2nd, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Beautiful… more and better data to prove Netflix is beating Blockbuster on a day to day basis. I love it. Congrats on the enhancements guys. Very useful.
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:10 am
http://blog.compete.com/2007/02/05/compete-attention-200/
was this an experiment to see if this concept should be expanded
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:11 am
–> http://blog.compete.com/2007/02/05/compete-attention-200/
was this an experiment to see if the ‘Attention-metics’ concept should be expanded
April 6th, 2007 at 10:31 am
I’ve been studying the concept of “attention economy” applied to web analytics for a while. At first, the idea that “attention” is equivalent to “time” sounds wrong to me. “Time”, in itself, doesn’t convey the quality of the attention level (attractive or aversive, voluntary or captive, front or back of mind). However, since time and traffic are the two elements that can be easily measured, your “Attention” index brings a valuable view of something that wasn’t available, or at least, not presented in such a convenient way.
What we will need, next, is the “finesse” of knowing our attention is not the same when we spend an hour looking at YouTube or doing our online finance… :)
S.Hamel
http://blog.immeria.net
April 21st, 2007 at 2:42 am
Deloittes have just released a report called “In the Dark” which shows that financial metrics alone do not show the senior executives or board what is the real health of the business. I write about this in my blog http://www.managementmythbusters.blogspot.com and that measuring actual activity in the right way is now possible through the digital age. Your new metric is a prime example of this, well done.