Friday, May 13, 2011

Start-Up Watch COD: Resonate Networks identifies target customers based upon their values and attitudes

It's absolutely amazing the amount and type of data sources now in use or in development for targeting. One of the most interesting data sets I've heard about is information on consumer values, an area pioneered by Resonate Networks.

Resonate combines information on values and attitudes with more conventional data sets to more precisely target users. Over the course of an engagement, the network is refining audience criteria to more precisely identify attitudes that correlate to a brand's specific KPIs.

So what are these unique targeting criteria?

Values
Beliefs
Attitudes
Partisanship
Ideology
Engagement on particular issues


These sorts of info are combined with media habits and geographic indicators to build audience profiles. Then Resonate buys media matching those characteristics direct from pubs, and delivers your ads.

Let's start with the "gimme" use cases. Political candidates, issues advertisers, political parties. Duh. It won't surprise you to learn that they have offices in Reston VA and DC. But its relevance is much broader than that. Brands can connect with users that share their company values, like interest in "green" or child nutrition, or nature/environment. Now let's go broader still. Brands highly interested in influencers can identify ideal prospects based upon their level of engagement on particular topics and issues. Hence the office in New York.

From there, let's talk about more precision messaging. By understanding the SEGMENTS of an audience, you can deliver more precise messages that connect with user groups emotionally. That segmentation could be in the form of design elements, copy, offers, you name it.

As examples, they offer these three profiles to hint at the breadth and depth of consumer insight they can provide:

Consumers who buy brands/products that demonstrate their personal success, are aesthetically appealing & make them feel rewarded

Mothers with children under 16 who support menu labeling & believe childhood obesity is a serious societal issue that brands need to help fix

Influentials who regularly read the WSJ & frequently watch CNN or Fox News, & oppose increasing taxes


Now some of these dimensions might not seem relevant to your brand. But by understanding whether a consumer cares about climate change, you could deliver a messaging featuring a Prius versus an Escalade. By understanding the individual's desire for prestige, you could serve up a BMW versus a Volvo ad. By understanding a Moms' level of involvement with child nutrition, you could choose between delivering an ad for Corn Pops versus Honey Bunches.

Let's play a game. I want you to imagine two people. One an Obama Democrat. The other a Palin Republican. Which do you think would be a better prospect for:

Pesto
Cheese Doodles
Chevrolet
Plantain Chips
Snow Shoes
Old Spice
Surfboards
Countess Mara Ties


We could spend days agreeing or disagreeing on these. And I'm not saying that these items appeal EXCLUSIVELY to one of these groups. But we deal in numbers of a fraction of a percent, and on that level, even a small skew can mean big profit.

The point is that attitudes and beliefs are the rational and emotional underpinning for how we see the world. And we reflect how we see the world in what we buy.

And this isn't all politics. There's more to it than that, as we discussed earlier.

Some of these connections are going to be less black and white than others, So Resonate says it takes a more consultative versus transactional approach to client engagements. They know data relationships better than we do, or can develop a testing plan to unearth the relationships between your brands and consumer attitudes.

Will it make a difference for your brand? No idea. But it may well make a difference for some brands. And as we look for new data sets with which to target, this is certainly an interesting one. Certainly not the same old thing with a different logo slapped on it.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first!

Start-Up Watch COD: Aisle 411 is your mobile shopping valet for finding, deciding, and saving

Find, choose, save, and have fun doing it all. That’s the concept behind Aisle 411, an iPhone app geared to helping people have better shopping experiences.

Aisle 411 offers a variety of consumer services including:

Find It: Aisle 411 makes it easier for you to find specific items in participating stores. It actually shows the location for an item on a map in stores that have made one available to the service. You can also use Aisle 411 to physically plan your store visit.

Learn It: By scanning a UPC, you get connected to info and reviews of the item. It can help guide decisions on new items and in crowded categories.

Save It: Scan the UPS of an item to see if there are any offers for it. Or review the offers the app automatically delivers to you in store. You can also say or key in a UPC to save. The offers are delivered to your store card, so it’s easier to redeem with Aisle 411 than with rebates and coupons you need to print or clip. Savings appear on your receipt.

List It: You can make shopping lists via the app or on PC, and segment your list by retailer. So your Safeway items on one list, and your Home Depots on another.


Additionally, Aisle 411 incorporates – you guessed it – social and game mechanics to help make shopping a more fun and rewarding experiences. Users can check into stores, publicize their check-ins via Twitter and Facebook, and earn badges based upon their visits and purchases. If being mayor of a Piggly Wiggly isn’t floating your boat anymore, Aisle 411 lets you become the store Captain. OK, OK, I don’t actually know if Piggly Wiggly is a participating retailer. I just like typing the words Piggly Wiggly. But you get the point.

There are also state badges and hidden badges you unlock by visitng areas of a store and performaning desired actions. It astounds me how many people find badges so compelling sometimes, but they do so there you go!

Here’s a little film to give you the Gestalt:



As tens of millions of people begin to use their phones to help make their shopping experiences better, applications like Aisle 411 are working hard to deliver on the promise. While based upon the app reviews, the service still has a few bugs, I am bullish on both the opportunity and the set of services they are providing. After all, they are incorporating a variety of services in a single app. Many other apps have a smaller set of capabilities.

I haven’t experienced the app myself as (on the date I wrote this in April) there is no Android version. But there reportedly will be quite soon. I’ll be watching for it.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD:Offermatic users opt-in to receive targeted offers through their credit cards

The online targeting industry is built on the idea of "opt-out" – that users are participating until such time as they make an effort to opt out of data-based advanced targeting. Assuming a clear and prominent disclosure of practices and a genuine means of opting out,

I think that's fine. I mean, something has to pay for 24/7/365 free access to the Library of Congress we call a computer that is sitting in our laps. Most targeting companies insist that if we moved to an opt-in model – in which consumers had to act to participate – then we’d have tremendous challenges driving revenue and profit that powers digital. I agree.

But a start-up called Offermatic breaks with the herd, using a model in which consumers receive rebates, rewards, discounts, and other offers by linking their credit cards anonymously with the service. In other words, they OPT IN to connecting their purchase and browsing history in exchange for great values.

It works like this. You join – without, BTW, providing any PII beyond an email address, and then connect your credit card(s) to the service, giving consent to your bank to provide transaction information to the service. Based upon your purchase patterns, you receive offers geared to your interests, favorite stores, location, and so on. Discounts and offers are STEEP – 50% - 90% is the range for initial offers.

Offers are delivered in emails. The user clicks on an offer, visits the site, and loads it onto their credit card. Provided they take the desired action within the specified time frame, they receive the discount or whatever without having to clip or print coupons or send in mail rebates.

More than just transaction data are used for targeting. Offermatic also measures browsing history, searches, site visits, and other metrics to develop a more precise targeting model.

Here’s a video that serves up the concept for consumers:



So here’s a totally cool dimension for retailers – Offermatic can use the transaction data to serve offers ONLY to people with desired characteristics. So, let’s think back to that infamous Gap offer through Groupon. Remember the one? $25 for $50 voucher. 440,000 takers. Certainly drove store traffic. But how many of those people were already Gap customers. It stands to reason A LOT. After all, a 50% discount is even more likely to appeal to a current customer than a nonuser. So a lot of that 50% was basically profit thrown into a fireplace.

Groupon, mass. Offermatic, precise.

With Offermatic, Gap or Target or YOU could make the offer only to non-users, or lapsed users, so that the deal drives new business into your stores. OR, you could reward current users who make incremental purchases. The point is, the choice and precision are yours to control.

Post purchase, Offermatic can send reminders to drive additional actions, or reward users who publicize their purchases in social media. Plus, Offermatic can deliver reports that tell you who your users are, what impacts the program had on loyalty, and other great data that any marketing org would want. You also get benchmarking to show how your metrics compare to purchase patterns of competitors.

In my view, Groupon's gonna have a tough fight on their hands when retailers get a close look at this outfit.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: MyLikes rewards influencers for taking brand messages viral

If newspapers and magazines and TV stations and web sites get paid to communicate brand messages, why not brand fans? Millions of people talk about and endorse brands in social media every day – and more and more brands are exploring ways to encourage more such sharing.

With the remarkable credibility of personal endorsements, there should be no doubt that we are going to see more and more marketers search for ways to dial up the social influencing in support of their brands.

MyLikes is a social media advertising and marketing tool that helps brands do just that. Essentially, MyLikes is a community of influencers who are offered compensation in exchange for TRANSPARENTLY communicating messages about brands in their Twitters, FaceBook Pages, Tumblrs and Blogs.

Users join the community by linking to one or more of their existing social media presences, and then identify their passions. By communicating their favorite topics and items to MyLikes, users get a customized dashboard of company offers that fits their lives. If you care about entertainment, then you are going to see offers related to movies and TV shoes and whatnot. If you are a cook, expect to find offers related to food and recipes. You get the idea.

Users select the offers that match their brand interests and communicate them to their social graphs. For every click that these communications spawn, the influencer is compensated.

When I joined, the offers I received ranged in potential compensation from four cents to fourteen cents per click. The four cent offers were generally for people to click and participate in online activities, while the 14 cent offer was to communicate information specifically about an Acer computer. It appears that the more overtly salesy the offer, the higher the compensation. Which stands to reason since the advertiser herself is setting the compensation figure.

One of the offers I received on my MyLikes offer page was an invitation todistribute the link to a quiz rating how much like Charlie Sheen’s the respondent’s partying style is. By posting a message linking to the quiz, I would be compensated 7 cents for every click the offer received.

The service prepopulates a Tweet that you can of course edit. When the Tweet appears in your stream, it is identified as an ad and the source is shown as MyLikes.

So I looked at the offers, picked one that I liked, Tweeted it. Easy peasy. Then I sit back and watch the money roll in.

(And just in case you are curious, I don’t party like Charlie Sheen. Shocker to those that know me, I know…)

That’s the consumer side to all this. On the brand side, the advertiser pays only when an influencer drives a legit click. One of the big questions I had about this was how they plan to avoid spammy clicking behavior. Their model actually monitors the community by analyzing extraordinarily high click rates, and each member’s behavior to ensure that the visits driven by the platform are legitimate.

In fact, all member profiles are public, as is the list of likes that have identified. This is another tool to help the company and its clients separate the evangelist wheat from the spammer chaff. You can field a campaign in moments using their searchwords-like ad platform.

My Likes has already garnered a set of leading advertiser clients, including The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft, Unilever, Sony Music, and Universal Pictures. Check out a whole mess of 20-second case studies here. (I need to remember this awesome case format the next time a client asks for these on their site. Nice.)

I like the simplicity of this platform, and how singularly focused it is on the problem of getting brand likers to become active evangelists. It delivers the transparency the FTC is looking for, and actually ensures that people who work hard on behalf of brands get compensated for their efforts.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: Prezi makes engaging presentations that go zoooom

People that know me know that I make an insane number of presentations. Like 2-10 a week. Lemme tell you, I know my .pptx better than anyone. I’m not going to claim that the PowerPoint developers call me for advice, but if I ever see a 425 area code on my caller ID, I’ll know who it’s from.

But I’m not here today to talk about PowerPoint. Rather, I want to tell you about Prezi, a remarkably nonlinear presentation tool that actually makes information exciting and delightfully entangling for audiences.

The idea behind Prezi is to make your content more engaging, and give it a more natural flow, by changing the basic foundation of a presentation from a series of separate slides into a virtual canvas that works like a white board. Prezi lets you glide from region to region of your virtual whiteboard, enabling you to deliver an animated experience that really is more interesting than a whole mess o’ slides.

I think of Prezi as that whiteboard plus a camera that allows you to move the field of vision from place to place. But it’s more than that. You can zoom in and out of content, or create a nonlinear flow that groups thoughts, ideas, and images in a more natural and viewer friendly way.

Video 411 below:



There are certainly plenty of times when nonlinear might work better for a preso. Imagine trying to talk about eight aspects of something. In a slide format, you’d probably have a list of eight things, and then tick them off one by one, returning over and over again to the same slide, maybe with a highlight box around the one you are going to move on to discuss. With Prezi, you could arrange all that in a circle. Drift from place to place by zooming in and out, so that the viewer gets the sense of the totality as much as the eight distinct ideas.

In addition to providing good in person presentations, you can also create presentations for online use. It’s as easy as cutting and pasting an embed code. This is an environment that, in my view, really benefits from the nonlinear structure to hold an audience and enhance their viewing experience.

Prezi also says that its technology can make a presenter feel more confident. I can see how that is true in that just as the audience may find a linear progression a bit cumbersome to follow, so too can the person leading the meeting.

If THIS presenter is any indication, Prezi’s ability to imbue relaxed confidence is pretty remarkable.



Oh, hey, I am not busting the guy’s chops for being VEEERY relaxed. In fact, I envy that.

Mastering the basics of Prezi doesn’t take long. Personally I didn’t find it any more challenging than those first few minutes with PowerPoint or Word, though the flowing nature of it does take a bit of adjustment. The adjustment comes in mindset. It’s easy to get carried away with the bells and whistles of Prezi and forget that its purpose is to help you communicate more clearly.

The flow of a good Prezi reflects the best way to connect ideas, not the most prodigious use of whizbangery. But once you get over those first few giddy moments of clicking and zooming and video embedding and and and, you move on to a permanent state of understated giddiness. You can make really exciting and engaging content that is a pleasure to present.

Hey, I am not throwing out my PowerPoint Eagle Scout badge any time soon, because I know it so well that I can knock out a 20 minute preso in maybe two hours. Prezi takes me longer than that, but there are certainly cases where its power is more than worth the time. I will say with total sincerity that there are times when I feel very fortunate to have access to the power of Prezi. And if you make perhaps fewer but more important presentations than I do, you may find yourself moving to Prezi for everything you have to present. It’s that cool. It’s that powerful.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: Admantx Redefines Targeting With Emotion

What makes content a great environment for ads? I think most of us would agree that all things being equal, context is beneficial, as is high quality edit. Nice design that ensures ad noticing value is also beneficial.

But what about emotional content and tone?

While the ideal emotional surround for your brand may vary, I ‘m certain that finding an appropriate match would boost results. Consider:

Editorial about the importance Moms play in our lives would surely boost the impact of a greeting card banner or vid.

An article about lonely puppies in shelters would motivate more of us to click on that Petfinder banner.

Content about the excitement of Fashion Week would likely make many a shopaholic more likely to interact with and click on a Saks ad.


But analyzing the emotional tonality of content is rather difficult when there are quadrillions of web pages out there. So I was very interested to learn about a company called Admantx, which provides greater intelligence as to the appropriateness of a given page of content for your messages. Admantx is a cloud-based platform that teases a tremendous amount of semantic meaning from web content.

Every sentence on a page is analyzed for five flavors of meaning:

Subject Matter: A noun is, to quote School House Rock, a person place or thing. Or a brand in our world o’commerce.

Category: Does the content relate to a particular class of advertised products? And if so, which one(s)?

Emotions: Is the content happy, sad, depressing, uplifting, etc. etc.?

Behaviors: By understanding the actions described on the page, the platform can offer a better match to products, brands, and categories.

Motivations: What are the underlying drivers?


Other companies offer some of these types of analysis. Where Admantx stands out is in its ability to supplement some of the rational analysis with rich emotional and motivational insights. This nifty graphic shows how the analysis of just one sentence wrings tremendous meaning from the words on the page.

Using all this information, Admantx delivers a better fit between the marketer’s message and the context in which it appears.

Here’s a vid that describes the value proposition.



One big advantage of this approach versus other targeting methodologies is that it is based upon an analysis of the page, not the person. As such, it bypasses all of the privacy issues that have been occupying a great deal of our thinking over the past months.

Admantx focuses its selling efforts on online publishers, social networks, ad networks and DSPs, who use the platform to:

Drive better response rates for their advertiser clients

Reexamine their “ROS” inventory to determine if it can be marketed and sold for higher rates

Analyze the emotional meaning of the content that they are producing so that they can adjust their editorial approach to attract more ad dollars

Monitor their content in real time on an ongoing basis


As such, it is a tool that can make a significant difference on how well sites, content and pages are monetized.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: HubPages goes further to appeal to advertisers and marketers

Say you're a publisher -- one that doesn't have nine digits of uniques or a "founded" date of 1998. How do you compete with leading established players in the content space?

It ain't easy. Most buyers have go-to publishers they use to reach and connect with certain audiences. These buyers tend to be satisfied with their choices -- after all, if they weren't satisfied with them, they wouldn't be buying them.

I want to emphasize that this isn't about buyer laziness. Rather, in a time crunched environment where results are essential, most buyers choose to go with media options that they know consistently deliver. Does that mean that something that might work EVEN BETTER may get overlooked? Perhaps. But in the absence of strong reasons to believe that a new choice will outperform the go-tos, buyers tend to stick with what they know.

So for newer media players, no matter how good their content, it's tough to attract the attention and dollars of leading digital buyers. To break into that exclusive club of preferred advertising solutions, new entities need to do more for advertisers.

HubPages is a community of more than 200,000 writers who join to get a forum through which to discuss what they are passionate about. These enthusiastic writers have created more than 1.1 million topical "hubs" through the company's easy-to-use page building tools and search-friendly architecture. The site reaches between 16-21 million uniques a month and its authoritative pages tend to score very well in the major search engines.

The topics covered by HubPages are legion, from Autos to Business to Games to Health to Personal Finance to Travel. There are, for example, almost 18,000 hubs about cars alone. From General Motors Corporation (18) to Vintage Cars (16) and Hot Rods (26). They range from slick and corporate to digital expressions of one person's all consuming obsession.

As we all know, the search engines love content-rich pages that are updated often, and the HubPages community delivers. Essentially, these 200,000 "Hubbers" are super bloggers anxious to monetize their knowledge and expertise through HubPages' revenue share programs. And the community offers a number of avenues to getting paid for your content.

HubPages feature a variety of ad formats from other companies, including Google AdSense, Kontera, Amazon, Advertising.com, Microsoft pubCenter, ValueClick and Glam Media. But it is with HubPages' own ad formats that the company is working particularly hard to earn the attention and dollars of the buying community. In addition to the gimme IAB sizes, HubPages offers a variety of truly massive and multi-functional placements that born integrate from page content and stand out from it. Like this:




Their large units can combine text, Flash, apps, pre-roll, and interactive video in experiences that are very much "foreground." I liken them to even larger versions of AOL's Project Devil units.

Similar to a Federated, HubPages can also work with brands on content integration including Hubber endorsement and special sponsored content with more extensive information about a brand than may be available anywhere else. Their ad services team can also make custom, and assist in the production of creative for the company's large ad sizes.

Why do they do all this? I think it relates back to my first point. In order to demonstrate that they can deliver more, they need to do more for brands and viewers alike. In addition to the creative freedom available, the community also offers a broad range of targeting options, including:

Channels
Seasonal
Audience Segments
Demographic
Behavioral
Geographic
Purchase
Keyword
Time/Day


So brass tacks. Will HubPages perform better than other content sites for you? Dunno. I would imagine it will depend upon the brand and the objective. But I do think they are offering the content, targeting, and creative options to warrant a look see.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: Atmio makes developing mobile landing pages good/fast/cheap

We’ve all heard the expression…”Good, fast, cheap. Pick two.” The idea of course is that it is impossible to purchase a service that is simultaneously high quality, inexpensive, and ready to go now.

Well, a company called Atmio thinks it has a solution to improving consumer experience and conversion rates for mobile web users -- a solution that delivers on all three. They see a huge opportunity in providing software that solves a host of the problems that have slowed companies from making the most of mobile web opps.

Atmio is a software company that makes products specifically to improve the mobile web shopping, learning, and buying processes. When customers seek to consider and purchase items through their mobile devices, Atmio improves their experience by offering easy to use tools that empower online marketers to make powerful and effective landing and shopping environments.

There are three components to their solution:

Mobile landing page generator that is very easy to use.

Behavioral targeting engine that enables dynamic changes to the landing page based upon visitor characteristics

Analytics that can be delivered through their Business Engine or Google Analytics.


The opportunity for developing better buying experiences on the mobile web couldn’t be clearer. By 2014, more people are expected to be surfing through mobile devices than through PCs. They’ve already crossed that threshold in a number of Asian countries. And the advent of tablets is only accelerating the trend. What’s more, the enormous range of phones and associated capabilities can make it difficult and expensive to deliver good mobile web experiences consistently and economically.

To use the Atmio page making platform, the marketer simply logs in and starts laying elements out onto a page. When they have a design they are happy with, they can test it on a phone and then deploy. The platform ensures that pages properly render on the full range of smart phones, which further reduces development costs. It works for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows 7 phones, and more.

The company serves up a long list of use cases where the companies offerings can drive better metrics:

Landing pages for mobile ad campaigns

Offering a mobile landing page alternative for CRM programs, to accommodate that that are reviewing emails over their phones

E-Commerce Mobile pages can enable you to capture buyer information to simplify the buying process for consumers

Event marketers can offer up a simple mobile landing page experience tailored to eventgoers

Retail QR pages: Instore displays can bear QR codes that take shoppers to specific info and offers online

Print and direct mail campaigns can bear a mobile url as an alternative, to accommodate people who prefer going online via phone.

Salesforce-Create pages that collect lead and other info and transfer it directly into salesforce


Santa Clara based Atmio offerings are SaaS services, and has four different grades of capabilities. You can see a comparison of these services here.

There’s no question that mobile web browsing will continue to grow rapidly, and that the need for improved transactional and other metrics for mobile web browsers will become more and more acute for online marketers.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: Longboard Media reaches shoppers when – wait for it – they’re shopping online

As the demands for ROI and accountability from digital marketing continue to grow more acute, more than a few companies are innovating to find ways to connect with active shoppers. After all, this model is the key to why search sucks up such a high proportion of online dollars. And now we have in-store mobile apps, and search retargeting, and and and.

The people at Longboard Media have become successful by recognizing that some of the most ingenious ideas are dead simple. In their case, they’ve built a business with one profound concept:

To reach and persuade shoppers, why not connect with them when they’re shopping?

Dammit I hate it when I see a start-up idea that was right there in front of me, but so obvious that I couldn’t see it. Another set of people (though truth be told, a group of people I like very much) have the opportunity to get rich, while I get the opportunity to write 504 words about their genius.

But no matter. My sour(ish) grapes aside, the concept behind Longboard should be under the slang dictionary under “sure thing.” They’re an ad network that focuses exclusively on a shopping vertical – that is, they aggregate inventory exclusively on shopping and comparison sites. Actually, given that they sell just 16 sites, with perfect transparency, they really fit under the rep firm moniker as well. Here’s a list of some of the properties they represent:

Buzzillions
Overstock
Smarter
Shop.com
Shopwiki
Productwiki
Geodelic
Shopsavvy
Become
Wize
This Next
Systemax


When you look at that list, it’s pretty easy to conclude that the people they are packaging up for advertisers are definitely in the buying mode.

Reaching more than 55 million people monthly, Longboard offers the opportunity for both focus and scale. Demographically, they represent a fairly broad cross section of demos, and a nearly even split of men and women. That surprised me a little given that women buy around 85% of total stuff, but I suspect it reflect men’s greater interest in online information seeking.

Targeting options are numerous, from demo and geo to retargeting, product and category level segmentation, and complementary product matching. In total, they offer solutions for 54 product categories. In addition to IABs, they offer page sponsorships, badge/buttons, text links, video, and custom programs based upon specific advertiser specs. All rich media formats supported.

While the concept is magically kerplunk, their technology platform is quite intricate and sophisticated, making it possible for them to deliver rather imaginative and customized programs suited to very specific business objectives.

It’s tough to know what else to say about these folks. It’s all there in the dead simple concept, and a set of business practices that offer what brands seek when they’re looking to cost effectively reach shoppers. Since so many purchases are either being made online or are being informed by online searches for information and advice, the concept is an absolute natural. Especially when brands in their 54 categories want to sell stuff ASAP.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: Gazehawk makes heat map usability studies fast and affordable

As a tool for improving the usability of websites, heat maps are quite valuable. They can literally show you where people’s eyes go on a page so you can understand the likely consumer paths. And indeed the unlikely consumer paths. In either case, the information helps identify strengths and opportunity areas (Jeez, I have been in advertising too long – I find it impossible to type the word w*aknesses anymore) of a particular design, and the relative merits of alternative designs.

An interesting start-up called Gazehawk has developed a platform to make heat map testing something that virtually any business can afford. Essentially it uses your webcam to track the visual activity of browsers to reveal what they are paying attention to, and how they navigate a site.

The service, however, provides more than just heat maps. It also collects comments and observations from your respondents, a replay of the web cam “shows” of your respondents, and personalized recommendations based upon the test results.

There are four packages currently available for purchase:

A $495 starter pack that provides ten respondents, heat maps, and gazing studies. Ideal for early iterations, or for small organizations that might otherwise forego any form of testing and “roll the dice.”

An $995 A/B test that offers two sets of ten respondents, heat maps, and gazing studies. This is a good approach for organizations trying to better understand the relative merits of two different designs.

A $995 Professional package that puts your design through the paces with 20 respondents, and adds more advanced reporting to the basic heat map and gazing study bundle.

An enterprise offering that can be integrated into a site for ongoing or periodic testing of new content, design changes and features. Pricing for this offering will depend on the breadth and depth of service required.


I was thrilled to find this offering. I have worked on many web site designs and builds in the past, and testing has always been a bit of a googly. Inevitably there are cost overruns on certain features or design elements, and often the first area that gets cut is usability.

Often, a kind of ersatz testing methodology gets shoehorned into the schedule – something like bringing a couple dozen people in from Craigslist to go through the motions of site usability, and then report on their experiences. I’m not saying such a methodology has NO value, but the usage situation is so artificial, and ultimately we must rely on what they want to tell us.

It’ll be interesting to see how the availability of such services transforms our industry. As we all know, there is, over time, a converging sameness to site designs, whether it’s the Appleesque nav/three box/three small box stack, or a handful of other approaches that are easy to execute. On the one hand, sameness s good in that it helps consumers know where to look as they enter new domains. On the other hand, truly remarkable design and UI is few and far between.

Gazehawk promises a number of great improvements to their service over time as well, from the ability to target respondents by demo to new visualizations of valuable consumer information. I am very excited seeing this much great stuff from a very new company and look forward to watch them grow.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first!

Who IS this freak Ron Paul?