Measuring New User Interactions Types: How Touch is Changing Marketing
The WhyPermalink
Customers are beginning to interact with brands in new and interesting ways. Clicks are giving way to touch, and touch is giving way to eye movements, voice, and biometrics. In a 2018 eMarketer survey, ‘voice interaction’, ‘multidevice interaction’, ‘Virtual reality/Augmented reality’, ‘Wearable Tech’, and ‘Gesture-based interaction’ were among the most perceived impactful visible marketing trends, with greater than 100% of respondents believing one of those trends will affect Customer Experience worldwide. Therefore, understanding these new interaction modalities and how to leverage them is critical to brand success.
While marketers expect these technologies to impact results, teams have struggled to leverage these new technologies. The reason is twofold. First, specialty hardware and software is required to build such experiences. Second, software may be difficult, hard-to-use, or not designed for marketer. Therefore, make sure to experiment with platforms to understand the team’s comfort with the technology. Thorough experimentation will enable your team to learn, as well as begin to expose new insights immediately.
Thorough experimentation will also generate new ideas for elucidating such behavior. For example, a VR racing game can embed branded visuals or interactive content embedded in gameplay, such as virtual billboards or custom car paint jobs. Measuring eye-tracking movements or gestures enabled by those interactions could answer questions like “What colors did the user select in the color-slider before settling on the final color?” or “did the user look at the branded content and if so, how long?”.
The HowPermalink
From a metrics standpoint, such metrics can provide better viewability for ads. Using the above racing example, rather than typical PPC or PPM pricing structures, a marketing department could negotiate a rate based on ‘pay per seconds of gaze’, in which the purchaser only pays when the user looks at the branded visual on screen. One could easily imagine these interactions broken down into ‘quick scan’ (looks under .5 second), by ‘eye’ (right or left), as well as ‘attenuated glance’ (any look with both eyes over a particular threshold). Such interactions tell a different story than a simple click, hover, or scroll.
While eye-tracking metrics represent a fascinating ideal for advertisers, behaviors such as touch represent unique and no less rich sources of data for brands. New constructs such as ‘tap’, ‘swipe’, ‘multi-touch’ (touch of interface with more than one digit), ‘pinch’, and ‘twist’, represent fascinating insights and tell much richer stories on their own than a click, and a set of these interactions tell a much different story about the customer experience than a series of clicks.
One options is to score the alternate gestures along with clicks, generating aggregate scores and with each of the above interactions adding points to the aggregate score. For example, a ‘click’ or a ‘tap’ worth 1, a pinch worth 2, and a ‘twist’ worth 7. Thus, the score for a screen in which the user clicked 4 times would be equal to two pinches on the same screen. Add in conversion funnel optimization and it becomes increasingly clear that these new interactions are often a lost piece of feedback to brands, and generating such metrics will be critical to future brand success.