Commentary

ClickPick: WebSideStory’s HitBox Enterprise

What do people do when they visit a particular website? Where do they go after the homepage? What do they click on? What attracts and holds their attention and what makes them leave? Many websites have long looked at visitor behavior as the missing piece of the puzzle in maintaining a successful site, and online advertisers have long lusted after that kind of information.

This month’s ClickPick — WebSideStory’s browser-based HitBox Enterprise — provides a solution to the problem. Simply put, the newly-patented HitBox can tell you just about everything you could ever want to know about user activity on a site you're considering for an ad buy (provided that site subscribes to HitBox).

Since 1996, HitBox Enterprise has been telling advertisers which promotions or keyword searches render the highest level of traffic and which online or offline marketing campaigns were most successful in terms of respondents and conversions. A number of recent enhancements have propelled the tool into the "really useful" category — a report from Boston-based Aberdeen Group now lists WebSideStory and HitBox as the No. 1 vendor for ASP analytics, with 17.5% of the market.

HitBox’s new Visitor Segmentation feature allows publishers to segment a specific group of users, either by the content they view on a site or the actions they take (making a purchase or filling out a form). Advertisers and publishers can then break these targeted users down by demographics and purchases, and "follow the loyalty."

The Flash Interaction feature is one of the most notable new features of HitBox because of its ability to report on how people interact with anything from a small animation (including ads) to an entire website built with Macromedia Flash. Web designers are increasingly using Flash to create sites that go beyond simple HTML pages to provide a more lively experience, but until recently, it has been nearly impossible to track visitor activity within Flash elements, and thus both publishers and advertisers were still sitting on the sidelines, waiting to make sure the water’s safe. HitBox is one of the very few analysis services that can measure this type of online activity.

So before you sign the IO, ask to see the site’s HitBox report.

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