Compete Introduces Attention-Based Web Metrics for Online Marketers

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Tuesday, April 3, 2007; 03:05 AM

Compete, a leading online consumer market research firm, today announced the launch of the industry’s first attention-based web metrics which provide a more sophisticated way to plan and assess online media investments. Compete is the only company to provide daily attention-based metrics that fuse engagement (measured by time) and traffic (measured by unique visitors) into a single, more complete picture of a web site’s marketing value. These new Attention metrics are available on Compete.com, the industry’s only free premium web analytics site.

"Compete.com has become a barometer for us at GigaOM when evaluating consumer-related web services,” said Om Malik Business 2.0 columnist and executive editor for technology blog GigaOM.com. “We depend on the web more every day, yet there is one aspect that is missing – a critical evaluation of internet services. The market needs better information and Compete.com offers a comprehensive and openly available tool to help make important decisions.”

While many of the top internet sites continue to grow, consumers are turning to smaller sites to research, shop and socialize online. This growth in the internet tail creates a fragmented landscape of websites that challenges marketers using traditional online media planning metrics. Paradoxically, while consumers spend more time across a wide array of niche sites – and relatively less time on portals – online marketers continue to concentrate their spending on the largest sites.

Compete’s attention metrics create a new standard for web measurement and are agnostic to technologies such as Flash and AJAX. For the first time, marketers can readily assess the real marketing value of any website by understanding how much attention the site garners relative to the total amount of time people spend online.

Compete’s new attention metrics are available for free at Compete.com and include:

• Attention: The total time spent on a site as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users;
• Velocity: The relative change in daily Attention; velocity is used to determine the relative growth of a website compared to other sites;
• In addition, segment-specific and market-based attention metrics are available through Compete’s Online Channel Effectiveness services.

“Consumers’ online attention changes regularly among even the most popular web sites,” said Jay Meattle, product manager for Compete.com. “By introducing our new daily updated attention metrics, Compete is helping online marketers move beyond more rudimentary measures such as page views or ‘visits’ to find high-potential advertising sites and get the most out of their online marketing investments.”

Compete.com has quickly become a standard web analysis tool for interactive marketers and web-savvy consumers. Since its launch in November 2006, the award-winning new service has garnered over 400,000 users who have requested over 3,000,000 site snapshots. Compete.com is the only site providing free premium web analytics, and is based on the industry’s largest, most diverse and most precise data.