Web analytics, web metrics, and how to use them to track and improve conversions

Virtual World Advertising and Virtual Ads, according to ClickZ are "...the ultimate combination of user-generated content and social networking -- except you're not just creating videos, posting profiles, and communicating via email or IM. Participants basically create an entire society within the construct of the game."  I would argue the Virtual Society ought to have Virtual Advertising:

".... As soon as you enable people to buy land and build structures, there's a need for skills like architecture and design, specializations and services that other participants are willing to pay for."

When Google bought AdScape, earlier this year, it was assumed that In Game Advertising would be red hot, or else, why would Google invest in an In Game Advertising platform?  Certainly, last year, advertising in Virtual Worlds seemed promising, and companies built islands to sell real world products virtually.  But does Virtual World Advertising actually Work, and if it did, how would we be able to measure the success of Virtual Advertising?

"...the problem with SL marketing doesn’t seem to be rejection of advertising in general, just indifference to the kind of virtual advertising they’ve seen thus far."

But it all comes down to Metrics - if you can't measure impressions, touches and click throughs (punch throughs) you can't really do analytics - and for all the hype of what Virtual Advertising promised - including Branding, there was not viable analytics to measure the outcomes, and no real strucured testing either.

 Adsoft enables Virtual World Advertising to tracked with the precision of high end Web Analytics.

Earlier this year, at the first Virtual Worlds 2007 in NYC, I met Jared Freedman (Ancient Shriner in Second Life), President of Code4Software, a Virtual World Development firm, that created V-Tracker, and I wrote about V-Tracker several times, including the work I do at IBM, providing metrics for the IBM Business Center in Second Life. 

In fact, Jared Freedman and I co-presented on Virtual World Metrics and Virtual World Advertising at the last Emetrics Summit in Washington DC this fall in a session titled "Old & New Together Again for the First Time".

Rick Wehrle, Monster.com
Marshall Sponder, IBM
Jared Freedman, Code4Software

We've been calibrating the business impact of the Internet since before the browser. Rick will relate stories of taking the measure of FTP, Gopher and USENET postings in the early '90s. Marshall is a Director of the Web Analytics Association, tasked with getting a handle on social media and Jared has written the first application for analytics for Second Life. What do these people have in common? What's changed? Come learn about much we've learned and how little we know, how far we've come and how far we have yet to go.

The In World Advertising Platform, what Code4Software named AdSoft, was talked about generally, at Emetrics, but tonight, for the first time, I was given a personal tour of the AdSoft platform running in Second Life by Jared Freedman and I think it's light years ahead of what anyone else has come up with yet.

First, I am under a non-disclosure agreement for the Web Interface of AdSoft; however I can write about how, using AdSoft, Virtual World Ads can be created, queued up, rotated, displayed (controling it's location) and measaured.   

If you desire, Urls can be tagged for tracking, using standard web analytics, when you have an analytics platform on the destination site - and your goal is to move people from Second Life to a Web Site; but you can do a lot more than this with AdSoft (which contains a version of V-Tracker), which is an in world adverting platform, much like Google AdWords is in the 2D Web.

I will be able to speak more about the AdSoft platform in the near future; it appears to be unique, no one that I'm aware of has anything even close to the power, complexity or stability of Code4Software's AdSoft in Virtual Worlds.

In addition, the AdSoft platform is portable to many all the major Virtual Worlds; pretty much any platform that uses http protocol can have a version of AdSoft ported to it.

One of the problems of many Corporate Islands in Second Life, is the low number of unique visitors that come on a weekly basis.  It's not an exaggeration to say the average visitation numbers are in the hundreds of Avatars a week - with perhaps, 750 Avatars a week being an unofficial corporate average.

But users of AdSoft have been able to achive 5 times more traffic, easily, running no events, just by using AdSoft.

I think this is the beginning of a wide open field, and a new level of metrics precision for Virtual Worlds, and I'm glad that I was among the first to know of it, see and it firsthand, and write about it here at Webmetricsguru.com.