Are Visitors Interested in Your Content? (NextStage Evolution's Evolution Technology, Web Analytics, Behavioral Analytics and Marketing Analytics Reports for the BizMediaScience Blog, 7 day Cycle, Part 7)

Know More: Attention, Behavioral Analytics, Cognition, Marketing Analytics, NextStageology, Web Analytics Web Analytics

NextStage: Predictive Intelligence, Persuasion Engineering, Interactive Analytics and Behavioral Metrics

We're in part 7 with two more posts to go in this arc. Here we're looking at Level of Interest as discussed in Defining Attention on Websites & Blogs.

Yes, I know other folks are suggesting they can correctly determine visitors' attention on a website. I disagree with their methodology and not just because NextStage does it differently. I would disagree simply because what they're measuring doesn't equate to attention or level of interest in any neuroscience, cognitive science, behavioral science, {pick your adjective} science that I'm aware of.

Here you see the Level of Interest in this blog's content over a seven day period. Pretty much this image is indicating that there was lots of interest in my blog from 24-29 Aug '07 (must have lots of weekend readers) with specific peaks on the 27th and 29th.

Well, what was I posting about on those days?

Date (and in order of posting)	Post
27	First Principles of Good Design
27	iPhonics
27	Got a kick out of this
27	Stonewall's Findings: A New Kind of Community Response Grid
27	Alberto Gonzales from the NextStage Perspective
29	Why my Juanita Bynum post failed to get traction
29	Romney, Mitt Romney, Governor Romney, Social, Social Networks, Social Media, Video, Multimedia, TV, Advertising

What's particularly interesting to me about this is that the values in the area chart above are not indicative of actual visitors. You could normalize one to the other and the same basic form would show through.

For example, the chart here is for the same period of time as above but is an aggregate of some 30 randomly chosen sites in our system. Evidently 29 Aug '07 was simply a day of interest across the board. This doesn't mean this blog wasn't interesting in and of itself, only that visitors to sites in general were showing more interest than they were on most other days. How come? Could be people were planning for the long weekend and didn't feel like focusing on the job. There are ways to know and that's beyond the purpose of this arc.

Does team standing affect your interest in other things? Oh, yeah...

Interestingly, things like having high levels of interest and attention across the board happen. Tex, one of our researchers who comments on our political research fairly often, noted that New England based people browsing during the 2004 baseball season demonstrated activity closely matched to how the Red Sox were doing in the playoffs.

One other time our staff sociologist noticed that people's anxiety levels closely matched where they were in their tax preparation cycle over a weekend. Fascinating stuff. To us, anyway.