ben robison

TapeFailure and Compete’s Attention

Two quick tidbits I picked up in the news today.

TapeFailure
Apparently, there is a new product called TapeFailure that will show you video of what customers are doing on your website. It doesn’t capture all the information that other solutions provide, but somehow converts their browsing experience into a video that you can watch. Other metrics include percentage of pages scrolled, distance the mouse moved, average clicks per page, user sight focus.

I can actually see some real value in some of the metrics (user sight focus anyone) but I’d be very interested to see how something like that is measured and reportes. I think the video thing is really cool, but it’ll be a complete flop if only for one reason. What one single user does on a site is unimportant. Marketers care about trends of what thousands and millions of users are doing, and we’ve got better things to do with our time than watch a video of one person’s experience on our website. It might find some novelty points, but it’ll never catch on. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong, but if I’m right, remember you heard it here first.

Attention
A group called Compete is now measuring a new metric that they’ve dubbed Attention. From the article…”it measures the total amount of time spent by US users on a website as a percentage of total time spent on the internet by all US users.” While Hitwise reports stats at the ISP level, Compete reports measurements by users that have their toolbar installed.

I won’t get into the problems of measuring the US population by the subset that use a particular browsing toolbar because this metric is not going to play that big of a role in the market. It will be useful for folks who want to pay for advertisements on other sites, they’ll know where to start to buy ads, but it also means that these companies now have a pretty good idea of how much they can charge for their adspace. It has little meaning for those who are trying to optimize their own sites to increase conversion.