A new product from NuConomy Studio Insights promises to be a new way of measuring web analytics. Instead of the old model of page views and traffic, NuConomy proposes a way to measure engagement. With their product, you can understand your users’ activities on your web site and how your users interact with your site’s various features
Measuring Engagement
When looking at criteria like number of visits, recency, and depth of visits, you can’t really determine a user’s engagement, either positive or negative, with your site. According to NuConomy CEO, Shahar Nechmad, “engagement” has become somewhat of a buzzword lately, often used synonymously with “attention,” so he wants to be clear that his product truly measures engagement, in the real definition of the word. Engagement is not only how many pages someone has viewed, but how engaged they are in the site’s brand and activities.
NuConomy Dashboard
The engagement levels are measured by using the combination of user interactions on the site, which includes things like purchases, media, uploads, ratings, comments, share with friends, and more, all depending on the nature of the site. These interactions are measured then combined to get an “engagement” rank for each one of the web site’s users or content pieces. Since every business is unique, everyone will need to measure different things. With NuConomy, the formula of what engagement means to you can be adjusted, giving more wight to some things, and less to others.
The product offers many insightful views into your web site’s analytics. There are bar graphs, charts, and tag clouds on almost anything you can imagine. You can even see how some items correlate with others, like you’re mapping out the butterfly effect for your own web site. For example, when you uploaded a particular type of content, did it have any effect on the ads your users clicked, did it increase purchases, etc?
And It’s Free!
The best part about the detailed analytics NuConomy plans to offer is that the platform will be provided for free to anyone. Previously, any company wanting to get this level of detail would have to spend ten of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars on a high-end web analytics product. Now that same level of information and analysis will be provided free to everyone. There will be a paid level of service, for sites that go over a certain level of uniques, and those users paid subscriptions will sponsor the free platform.
What’s Next?
Once site owners understand more about their users, the next step would be to provide those users more relevant ads. Beyond just parsing a site’s text and extracting keywords in order to show appropriate ads, ads based on who a user really is and how they engage with a website could lead to a new model of advertising where the ads more interactive and meaningful.
However, with improved analytics such as these, there is a fine line between learning more about your users and exploiting that knowledge for financial gain. Of course, advertisers want to know as much as possible about those they are marketing to, but many users are wary of anything that could jeopardize their privacy. So in the end, the question may be, how much of your privacy would you be willing to part with if the information you shared meant a better web experience?
NuConomy has been a closed beta for the past 6 months in Israel, but now opened its U.S. offices and is continuing its closed beta here with a few hundred U.S. companies on board. The public beta will be available a couple of months.
