Pronet Advertising

Attention Metrics: Going Beyond Numbers

A little over two months ago, I asked the question: should we measure traffic in minutes? The question was prompted by Scott Karp's observation that not all traffic is created equal, and my own conclusion that consequently, 5000 quick visitors from one source are not as useful as 500 visitors from another. A few days ago, Compete answered my question.

Towards the end of my previous post I asked,

Perhaps we should use time spent by average visitor and total time spent reading a post as a metric to measure site rank, exposure, and popularity rather than just the number of hits you get. What do you think?

In response to that question, Compete has come up with two new metrics to better gage a site's influence, one of which is in the same vein as my proposition. This new method of evaluating sites is called "Attention Metrics" and works as follows:

Attention: calculates the total time spent on a site, calculated as a percentage of the total time people spend online (U.S. users only). This gets around the overstating of a site's importance as a result of transient traffic spikes and unique visitors/page-views, as well as understating of a site's importance as a result of low page-views due to use of technologies such as Flash, AJAX, and so on, simply by using time as a metric instead of absolute number of hits.

Velocity: is simply a measure of the change in daily Attention and can be used to asses the growth of a site relative to others.

As an example, look at the following chart provided by Compete, that measures a site's importance using three different metrics.

One site that clearly stands out is Runescape. While the site ranks 436th in terms of unique visitors, it ranks at number 15th based on the "Attention Metrics".

While in my opinion (stated 2 months ago) this is a good metric even if just used to gage your site's popularity based on the usefulness of your traffic, where this system will really prove useful, as pointed out by Richard MacManus, is in helping marketing people find "high-potential advertising sites".

Terry Ng, April 5, 2007

I'm not surprised Runescape has a high attention ranking. It's an online game, so people that are going there are spending much more time on it, compared to a search engine or the like.

Everyday Weekender, April 5, 2007

those are some interesting numbers... to me anyways.

Tom Nixon, April 6, 2007

A big problem with measuring the time users spend on page is tabbed browsing. Right now I have a whole load of pages open in different tabs in my browser - in theory all clocking up viewing time when the fact is simply that I haven't got around to closing them yet. I'm not saying there's no value at all in measuring the time spent on pages... you just have to take it with a pinch of salt.

Rahul Sharma, April 6, 2007

The time factor came as a surprise!

Ra.