Was quoted by Valeria Maltoni on How to Measure Attention recently; it's interesting how and idea grows, takes flight, and evolves.
As I sat in at a DoubleClick vendor session today at SMX East about Spotlight tags and how they could be used to track cross channel conversons (and have been, for the last 10 years, or so) I keyed into Valeria's response to a reader where she writes:
"...Google tracks a lot of movement online. It would be fascinating to see how and if the information converges between Analytics for blogs, DoubleClick for ads, gmail, maps, and all sorts of other products they have. I had a demo of the maps capabilities at a recent conference and was blown away at the interactivity one can build in 3D."
Google, via DoubleClick would be able to tell that an visitor who came to a site (cars.com) and did a site search and then came back again and did another, more detailed search, for example, according to Valeria, the person would have engaged with the site:
"....if the same searcher came to Cars.com and put in the search "new sedans" then later, came back and put in the query "reviews of new silver sedans" that searcher is engaged, she is definitely paying attention with an action in mind."
I suspect, and I may be wrong here, that DoubleClick handles what happens to a visitor till they arrive at the landing page (in this case, the site search page) and then, site analytics, such as Google Analytics, tracks past this point to the final destination pages on the site. If so, there may be a missing link between what DoubleClick picks up and what Google Analytics sees - and if we had that gap bridged, we'd be able to do, for sure, what Valeria suggests.
Getting back to the physical representation of "attention", there's only on platform that actually shows it much the way I suggested, only it does it for sites, not keywords (hey, that's an idea, maybe Compete.com should adapt the idea they apply to sites and make it work for keyword phases).
Compete.com considers the measure of attention as "....all the time we collectively spend online and then determines what percentage of that time was spent on a given site." But what if we changed that definition to "...all the time visitors collectively spent on a website and then determined how much time was spent on a given keyword phrase". Then we might have something. Unfortunately, we can't do it via visitor yet - but Google Analytics, were it to use the DoubleClick data, depending on how the data from DoubleClick is used, could track individuals coming to my site, searching and then searching again. I'll do the next best thing and talk about site behavior as a whole.
So...let me try it - just playing around - my site, www.webmetricsguru.com had 5,964 visits last month (September 08) at an average visit length of 45 seconds per visit. Taking 5964 * 45 = 268360 seconds were spent on my site, in total, by all visitors in September.
Taking the keyword "Radian6″ as my start point with 15 visits last month and an average visit length to my site of 31 seconds = 15 *31 = 465 seconds.
So, what percentage of all the time spent on my site last month was spent on the keyword "Radian6″? (465/268360 = 0.173%)
So, if we wanted to calculate "attention" for a keyword phase (which is part of what Valeria is talking about) we'd take that same formula and apply it to that same keyword, but in August, July, June, May, and then make a chart, for example, and see if the slope of that attention is up, or not.
August = (188/92870 = 0.202%)
September = (465/268360 = 0.173%)
There wasn't much activity in August and July and June haven't been tracked this way, so according to this example, the attention might be going down for that term.
Also, even at this level, Google Analytics does not show you other keywords used as a result of "radian6″, though it seems that data ought to be pull able.
So... we can't actually go all the way with this example Valeria Maltoni came up with because we'd need additional tracking.
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