The Accurate Audience Measurement Tools are Here. The Accurate Audience Measurement Tools are Here.
May 2nd, 2008 | by Brad King |
Image by Josh Bancroft via Flickr
PaidContent.org is one of the best sites on the Web. Grab their feed.
They have a piece today that discusses a new tool that combines mobile and Web traffic stats. This comes on the heels of their service that tracks PC-TV viewing alongside traditional television viewing.
Once of the fights we always had a Technology Review — outside of aesthetics — was how to properly gauge whether we were successful online. It’s hard to know where — and when — everyone is coming because there are multitudes of operating systems, browsers and all of that to track.
Does my local newspaper have a massive influx of readers from the Palm Treo? I have no idea, although I’d suspect not. Does Technology Review have the same reponse? I suspect Technology Review readers have a variety of RSS and mobile devices at their disposal.
There was no way for us to really know, though, because we didn’t necessarily have the best tools for tracking that information. We couldn’t answer fundamental questions: how much time do we spend building our mobile site? How much do we spend developing business models around RSS? How much time to we devote to the graphical user interface?
In a world with no metrics, the answer was always the same: who knows.
As these metric tools mature and as Microsoft and others create the “sphere of influence” tools that give context to the advertising dollars spent on a site, we’re going to see some patterns emerge.
It won’t be long, I don’t think, before some large sites derive a sizable number of their page views from feeds and mobile hits.
What would be really cool is to see an RSS service full together the headlines of the day and text them to you, but only if the links opened a Mobile Web-friendly page (and not the whole G/D’d page, which ticks me off and often crashes my phone).
What do you tell your advertising department at that point? I know we sold all these banner ads, but 40 percent of our traffic comes from places where there are no banners.
The metrics, though, give us a fighting chance to see emerging patters and understand where we should spend our development dollars. We follow the crowd. We build where they want to go. We create where they end up.
