Not every click is created equal. While publishers know exactly how many visitors per day their sites get, this aggregate data doesn’t say much about the actual value of the individual visitors and what they do on the rest of the Web. Social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos wants to bridge this gap with its latest product: Sysomos Audience. Using proprietary technology, Audience can automatically assign a certain value to individual visitors, based on the other sites they visit and other factors users can tweak in the service’s scoring engine.
Going Beyond Traditional Web Analytics
As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us earlier this week, traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics tools help users get a good understanding of what a visitor is doing on your own site. This, however, doesn’t tell you anything about the sites that influence your visitors and the actual value of these visitors for you business. After all, somebody who tends to visit auto blogs is far more likely to buy something from your auto parts site than somebody who doesn’t show any interest in cars.
Sysomos wouldn’t give us any details about how it tracks a user’s behavior across the Internet. Bansal told us that the company doesn’t use cookies and just places a small snippet of JavaScript code on the publisher’s site. Thanks to the data Sysomos already has in its Heartbeat and MAP social media monitoring and analytics tools, the company can easily identify the ecosystem around a certain topic. How Sysomos can tell that one of your visitors also went your competitor’s sites and read Autoblog earlier in the week remains Sysomos’ secret, however.
For publishers and e-commerce sites, this also means that they can now keep a closer tap on their social media ROI. After tweaking Audience’s scoring engine, marketers can now see exactly what the value of a given campaign on Twitter or the company’s blog was. You can also see what blogs tend to bring the most valuable visitors to your site and then specifically target this audience.
We do have some lingering questions about how Sysomos can track a user’s behavior across the Internet and the potential privacy implications of this, but there can’t be any doubt that this will be a very popular tool among marketers, community managers and sales managers. Sysomos is currently testing Audience with a small group of beta testers and plans to open the service to all of its clients by the third quarter of 2010.
