Compete.com launches new web metric

With the advent of new web page design technologies such as AJAX and Flash, page view and even visit metrics are becoming outdated as information on a webpage can be updated without the need for refreshing. An extreme example is Justin.TV, a website on which you might never have to refresh the page.

With consumers turning to smaller, niche sites while searching, socializing and shopping there is a need for marketers to keep track of “high-potential advertising sites” and to shift their focus somewhat from the web giants.

For this, marketers will need to go beyond the basic measurements currently being used, and analyze a new level of consumer engagement.

Enter Compete.com. The online market research firm has just announced their latest metric which they refer to as “attention”. It is measured in engagement (time) and traffic (unique visitors) to give what they describe as “a single, more complete picture of a web site’s value”.

Marketers could be overlooking sites that, using previous metrics, might not have been seen to have the potential they need get the most out of their budgets. To use an example from Compete.com’s recent list of top 10 websites ranked by attention, a relative unknown in terms of unique visitors (runescape.com ranked 436) and page views (ranked 36) is suddenly ranked 15 alongside Wikipedia, Bank of America and Amazon.com in “attention”.

Tags: compete.com, consumer engagement, metrics, page views, visits, web analytics