Social media monitoring firm Sysomos is launching a new service for marketers to measure the dollar value of each person who visits their company’s website. It is called Sysomos Audience (currently in private beta). Sysomos Audience is an analytics tool which at first looks similar to Google Analytics, but with one big difference: it goes beyond measuring visitors directly from referring sites and tries to determine where else a visitor has been on the Web, including competitor’s sites, blogs, and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It then estimates the ROI of each visitor by putting a dollar value on each one based on the other sites that person has been to recently.
For instance, someone who visited a competitor’s site and read three blog posts on similar topics to your company’s product (based on keywords each customer provides during setup) will have a higher estimated “engagement value” than someone who just came from a news article. If that visitor fills out a form on your Website or requests more information, they get an even higher score. Sysomos takes those engagement scores and organizes visitors as leads much like you would see in a CRM app, with a data snapshot of their estimated dollar value and where else they’ve been.
It also lets you drill down by site and see the traffic from that site along with the overall engagement value by site, with the idea that marketers can use the data to target their advertising to those sites which deliver the most value. An online kitchen retailer might discover that a particular cooking blog delivers much more engaged visitors and potential purchasers than a bigger recipe site, for instance, even though the number of visitors may be smaller. The screenshot below shows the estimated engagement value of TechCrunch to Sysomos over the past month.
So how does Sysomos know the browsing history of people who come to a particular site? The company won’t reveal its secret sauce, but says it does not use any place any cookies on people’s browsers and uses only anonymous data unless the visitor voluntarily fills out a form, in which case they use that information as well. Rather it uses a javascript tag on each customer’s site and clever tracking techniques which somehow taps into parts of each visitor’s browser history. The company wouldn’t go into much more detail than that, but it just goes to show that anything you do online can and will be tracked.
