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How can you reduce the abandonment rate? First, you need to identify which steps cause this drop. But when the steps are all within the same page, what can you do?

Statistical studies for ergonomics provide interesting results, because all the visitors are measured.

I have already mentioned how we can measure the visibility of the different blocks of information that compose a page. You can see the demonstrations about articles and comments visibility, or adbanners visibility.

Let's talk today about usage.

Using a computer means interacting with it. Most of the time, you use your mouse and keyboard to interact.

On the Internet, some contents are designed not only to be seen, but also to be used:

• forms
• flash animations
• ajax applications...

Sometimes you need to click, sometimes you type, or you just move your mouse over an area.

In order to get consistent and comparable measurement, we have defined usage ths way:
Usage duration is the duration when the content is visible and there is mouse-keyboard activity on the content.

Difficult to give a more simple definition, isn't it?

There are countless applications of this technology:

• ergonomics improvement (pages are often too complex)
• ajax functionalities measurement
• basket abandonment analysis
• forms optimization...

We have prepared a demonstration of how to measure the usage of different pieces of a page.

This demo shows that we can measure for instance the different steps required to finalize a purchase, even if these steps are achieved within a single page!

We can even go further and measure how it takes to fill each field of a form!!!

These studies interest every e-commerce website, but also all the websites that make you fill forms, or that provide online applications.
Basically everybody, no?

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Analytics can be very efficient to improve a website's ergonomics.

Let's quote three main types of ergonomics studies:

• focus groups, with or without eye tracking technologies
• comparative statistical analysis
• usage measurement

Focus groups consist of observing a small number of testers (usually less than 20) when they use the website. You analyze their clicks, what they look at (eye tracking), and also ask them questions about their feelings and comments.

Comparative studies are achieved thanks to different versions of certain pages, and the analysis of the results of each version. For instance, Google optimizes their pages by testing different versions on a few million users (!) and comparing the click rates on their ads.

I will spend more time on the third method, to which Alenty's technology provides new possibilities.
A measurement tool is embeded into the page (and potentially for all the visitors). This tool records several parameters about the usage of actual visitors (visibility and usage mainly) of different elements that are inside the page.

This way you can know if users scroll down the page, or if they use such or such functionality. It is allthemore interesting as more and more actions don't make any server call, and are completely invisible to the webmaster. Ajax technologies for instance drastically improve the website's ergonomics, but on the other end, the webmaster gets less information.

The type of analysis is extremely large, and depends on the specific needs of your site:

• visibility of blocks of information, of advertising banners
• conversion funnel within a page (when several steps must be validated for instance)
• drop rate on a form (what question generates the highest drop rate, before the form is even submitted!)
• usage of different application modules (widgets for instance), etc.

Soon, a specific demo about this concept of usage, are you interested?

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Plugg.eu is a conference on march 19th, in Brussels, Belgium.

Alenty is one of the 20 European start-ups selected to compete during the conference.

The jury is composed of entrepreneurs and VCs.

You can come to meet us, or provide your support and applause my presentation to influence the jury ;-) !

To register, go to the registration page!

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The buzz word of these days is "attention", like "being aware", not like "being careful".

What is attention?
You can look at this definition (via French Wikipedia, I translate):
"Attention is when the mind captures, in a clear and vivid way, an object or a series of ideas among many other possible ones (...). It implies that some objects are removed so that the others can be efficiently treated."

Moving from psychology to business, this definition can be summarized, in a very personal way:

• instead of thinking how you can please your wife or play with your kid, focus your attention on how you can spend your money
• once you are compeled to buy, what product "among many other possible ones" will "capture" your mind (brrr… scary, isn't it?)

Well… But this new and more psychological definition of advertising presupposes that we are not so stupid, which is already not as bad as the old advertising definition...

We are able to make choices, so how can marketers influence them?

By capturing as much attention as possible.

Attention can take different shapes that have a different intensity. If we only look at the attention through a computer (which has a limited number of inputs and outputs), we can define the following kinds of attention:

• viewing (reading, watching a video, viewing an image, etc.)
• hearing (the sound of a video, a song, a speech, etc.)
• using (moving the mouse, clicking, keyboard strikes, joysticks, etc.)

They correspond to the three senses that are accessible through computers, if you assimilate using and touching.

As man is multitask (well, this is true for his wife), he/she can see and hear at the same time. And "see" does not mean "use".
Of these three kinds of attention, one can only say that usage seems more intense than the other ones, because it takes into account touching, viewing, sometimes hearing, and always thinking.

Different business sectors will prefer different kinds of attention:

• newspapers will focus on viewing (reading mostly, but more and more video)
• the music industry on hearing
• the game editors will target the usage.
• brands will mix the three above to maximize attention

Economy is the science of scarcity management, "attention economy" need a scarce resource.

Time is a scarce resource that is common to all of us.

So, I think that attention economy can use time as a currency. But which time? We can define three kinds of time:

• viewing time,
• hearing time,
• using time

The total time spent on one of these attentions (don't forget that they can be done in parallel), can be called "attention time", and can be measured.

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Who's Hot can now be installed on all the websites!

Go to your personal space to register your site: http://www.alenty.com/xwiki/bin/view/Perso/MySites

With the universal Who's Hot, each visitor to your website makes you hotter, and you gain visibility!

Universal Who's Hot cannot filter comments, as it does for Wordpress and TypePad. This feature requires that Who's Hot gets integrated with the blog system.

But if you want to filter comments on your site, you can join our developers program. We will provide all the documentation and support that we need to make Who's Hot fully functional on your website.
You will see, it is very simple!

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The new version of Who's Hot is available!

Who's Hot can now be installed in a few clicks on:

• Wordpress
• TypePad
• Blogger

As in the previous version, Who's Hot analyzes contributions, readings and comments on a blog.

Visitors are more or less hot, depending on:

• their engagement with the community (time spent on the site),
• but also the content that they provide (time spent by the other visitors, reading their articles, and even their comments!)
• the reactions of the community (comments written about their articles)
• the tags of the different communities they belongs to...

Temperatures reflect their level of influence. Comments can also be filtered out, depending of the temperature of their author.

Who's Hot now shows a miniprofile when your mouse moves over the widget.

The miniprofile tells the visitor why a member has such temperature. It shows:

• the sites this members is admin of
• the temperature that the member has on the tags of the current site

This way, visitors can see which are the expertise area of the other contributors and visitors of the blog. The hottest ones can drive new visitors to their own site.

Interesting visitors make a community dynamic.
Who's Hot makes the best contributors more visible and helps them increase traffic to their site. So Who's Hot is a CRM tool for blogs, as it encourages them to bring the best content.

And you? Do you want to make your community more efficient?
Click here to install Who's Hot on your site

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In the war that opposes FaceBook to MySpace, there is another war, the audience metrics war.

MySpace is open, accessible to all.

FaceBook is closed, you must be logged to access it.

MySpace's audience is measured in unique visitors.

FaceBook's audience is measured in members.

There are obviously fewer members than visitors, because a member who is using several computers corresponds to several visitors, even "unique" ones. You could object that there can be several members on a given computer (in a household or in a cybercafé), but on average, uniques visitors are more important.

So, what metrics is closer to reality?

The concept of member is a better estimation of what I've called in a previous article, the "idiot" visitor.
At one condition: he/she must have good reason to identify.

This si the case for FaceBook, but it quite rare that 100% of visitors log-in (and some Google services for instance). Most of the time, only a part of the visitors will identify.

But as soon as a visitor is identified, why not use this information? Let me make myself clear...

Alenty's audience measurement system can recognize when visitors are identified on a website. Those who are not, are measured, as all site-centric tools, by a cooke.

So, we can do the complete usage analysis, using either the member identification (when available), or the cookie.

This way we get a better view of the real site audience.
Maybe fewer visitor numbers (because they have been deduplicated), but a better estimate of their visit frequency, the time they spend on the site, and the possibility to link these members to the internal website clients database!

All this, of course, automatically, and transparently....

What do you think of such a mix model?

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Advertisers pay for banner deliveries, but in fact, they'd like to pay for visibility. For a long time, they've been told that it is the same, or that it is impossible to measure if their banners are actually seen.
And they have started to believe it.

With the planned disappearance of page views, the way ad space is sold will have to adapt. Ad banners will no longer only be served when the page opens, but also at other moments.

But this evolution will only happen if you can prove advertisers that their ads are actually seen.

"Seen"? What does it mean? Except with eye tracking technologies, it is hard to say that they are seen.

But eye tracking is too restrictive. It measures if banners are looked at. But you can see an ad even if you don't look at it. That's what is call opportunity to see, and that's the standard of ad measurement.

This standard gets translated into two characteristics:

• the banner is visible
• while the user is active on the computer

Our technology allows the finest measurement of how long a banner is seen.

Check it out on our new demo of banner exposure!

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In order to have a good start in 2008, we have met In Real Live at Quimper (French Britany).

You may not be aware of it, but Alenty is organised in two sperate locations.

I work from Paris, and the other members of the team, four engineers, are located in Quimper.

Nicolas THOMAS, cofounder of Alenty, has hired Sylvain Le Roux, Kevin Arnoult and Samuel Linclau in September and October. We've been working together since, but I had not actually met them until this week!

So, we have set up a sand yatch "warm up" to get to know each other.

Let me show you the before-after sand yatching.

BEFORE:

From left to right: Sylvain, Laurent, Kevin, Samuel, Nicolas.

AFTER:

From left to right, under the layer of wet sand: the same!

All the member of the Alenty team join me to wish you the best for 2008!

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I have recieved by email this document published by Razorfish. I could not find the source of the document, otherwise, I would have put a link to its original location...

The document present the 10 main trends of social marketing. In a nutshell, social marketing will last, it will change many things (from advertisement to customer relationship), and you must now take into account what the author calls "the third dimension of marketing (after "brand marketing and direct response"): influence marketing.

In the word of networks, each individual is a node that can either broadcast a message or stop transmitting it.

How can you know if someone will be willing to transfer an information to his own network?

It may be difficult to predict whether this individual will agree with the content of the message (try to convince me to say that cars in Paris are great!).
But this is the role of marketers, whose job is to understand the expectations and values of their clients, or more generally, their community. And provide the best messages.

But this is not enough!

You also need to know if the individual has the capacity to transfer the message.

These two conditions (willingness and capacity) are mandatory.
And the second one is our job, at Alenty.

The capacity of influence depends on the individual's network. Each member of this subnetwork must have the same characteristics of willingness and capacity.

The capacity of influence of one individual depends on the capacity of influence of each member of the individual's network. And so on, recursively.
So, this is much more complex to compute than, say, the opportunity to see an advertisement...

This capacity depends on the way the individual communicates and the way his network receives the information.

These two notions correspond to community engagement and efficiency.

Both belong to our core method of social network analysis.
The temperatures that you see in Who's Hot are the result of this recursive analysis of engagement and efficiency of each member of the community.

In other words, our Alenty degrees are a metrics of social influence.