Tracking Users
NuConomy tracks your site activity at the user level, allowing you to get a deeper
understanding of each user’s behavior and optimize your site for each user.
We identify users by using a combination of UserIDs for registered users and cookies for anonymous
users. This unique way of identifying users allows you to get a very accurate view
of the number of users who browse and interact with your site.
Other analytics platforms use only cookies in order to track and identify a unique user. As cookies are tied to a single computer, if the same user visits your site from both home and work computers, the user will be counted as two unique users. Because we also track UserIDs, these replications are avoided and we provide one view into each user, thereby creating a much richer and complete behavioral profile combining both work and home activities.
Users and Contributors
NuConomy understands that a site is a living ecosystem where visitors and content pieces have distinct relationships between them. As such, NuConomy tracks two different types of visitors:
- Users – In this perspective, NuConomy tracks visitors as they browse and interact
with your site. As users perform different activities, all those activities are
attributed to the user that performs them. Which activities is each user performing
on each piece of content?
- Contributors – In this perspective, NuConomy attributes users’ activities to the
specific user that “owns” the content those activities were performed upon. For
example, when users read a specific article, the system tracks that activity and
attributes it to that user (see #1).
However, we also attribute those views to the writer of the article itself; this is the concept of ‘contributor’. The rational behind this is that if the contributor did not write this article, all the activities that happened on it would have never happened. In an e-commerce setting, a manufacturer or brand would be the contributor (e.g. when users purchase a Sony TV, the purchases are attributed to the users who made the purchase and also to Sony, with Sony the contributor).
Users Engagement
Until recently, advertisers oftentimes determined which sites on which to advertise
based primarily on the number of impressions (page views) the sites generated. With
the advent of enhanced tracking capabilities, like NuConomy, the industry is changing.
Advertisers understand that the quality of impressions is even more important than
the quantity of impressions. Quality impressions occur when users are engaged with
the content. Research shows that users that are more engaged and loyal to a particular
site will also be more open to the marketing messages on that site.
So, what is engagement? There is no one definition for engagement; every business is unique,
so every business has a slightly different definition of engagement. As described
above, using NuConomy’s ranking formulas, you can do just that. You can define as
many engagement formulas as you want and easily run them across all of your users,
finding out which users are the most engaged in your community and, thus, the ones
most valuable to your business.
For example, in an e-commerce store the definition of engagement could be a combination of the following:
- Purchases
- Bids
- Reviews
- Shares
- Views
Of course some activities show more engagement than others. For example, users who comment are probably more engaged with the content than users who just read. To account for this, you can easily set weights for each activity in the ranking formula you create.