VR Analytics : How is it different ?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s likely you have read or heard of recent Virtual reality developments. Maybe you have even pre-ordered your consumer VR devices, from the likes of HTC, Sony or Oculus.
Businesses are already embracing the VR technology. New uses cases are being created every day. Furthermore, VR can also be introduced in existing channels adding value to a point of sale for example. It has the potential of becoming an important element of the informed purchase experience while playing in a virtual world, exploring social media, watching a game ‘LIVE’ and many more.
We at Integna, have been working with some these trailblazers for sometime now. All viewpoints shared are based on implementation experience gained while helping some of our customers.
How does Virtual Reality (VR) analytics differ from traditional web or app analytics?
Can we transfer existing knowledge to this new field?
How will we measure the most important goal — attention, in virtual reality?
The bread and butter of analytics
How do we measure activities on a website today?
Without getting into details, we measure Attention & Action.
Let’s start with the easier one in virtual reality — Action in VR — when the user activates something. Opening up a new scene, click-looking on a button or purchase a new product. These are easy to track. In fact, measurements can be done using the existing tools like Google Analytics. We can easily get the same figures as we do now: when, how often and who interacted with what part of the environment.
Attention is a bit more complicated, but in a way developers and advertisers will love. In virtual reality, we know exactly where the user is looking, where’s their eye focus, hence their attention.
In web analytics, we do have a similar metric called mouse-over, where we can measure when the cursor hovers over a piece of content. You can build nice heat maps with a similar technology. You can argue this is simply guessing attention, and you are not exactly wrong. A true attention map requires eye tracking, something that you normally only do in UX research labs.
In a 360 virtual environment, this is a bit different. A content heat map sounds like a good idea, but it’s tricky. It’s easy to quantify VR — it has pixels, just as websites have — but it is super hard to analyse data which is always changing. There’s just way too much to track, and the process has to be simplified in order to develop actionable insights.
Looking at something versus watching something
Display advertising will thrive in virtual reality. Having virtual screens in a virtual environment is the first thing that comes to mind, but we have to learn our lessons from the not-so-glorious state of display ads.
There’s quite a difference between looking at an ad and watching an ad. Both of these actions have our attention to some degree, but they are different in terms of our commitment. The insights about page depth and scroll depth on a webpage have the equivalent in VR, too: the amount of time and focus we spend in different scenes in a virtual environment. It can be quantified and measured easily.
A very different user journey
The ultimate question of analytics is simple: have we met our goals by creating this platform?
To answer this we define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), set up KPI goals we need to achieve, and create funnels where we gently push users towards conversion. In the virtual reality KPIs and goals can be defined the traditional way. We might need new metrics, but the process is pretty much the same.
The funnel metaphor won’t work though, as the user journey is very different. In a virtual reality environment, users love to aimlessly look around sometimes, creating an insane amount of noise. Sure, we can establish checkpoints, like a virtual screen that runs our ad, a virtual shelf in a virtual house with product placement, a button to trigger a new scene; but we also have non-interesting but spectacular places where the user can wonder around for an hour contributing towards none of our KPIs.
The answer is creating virtual zones, areas which are important in achieving our goals. Activities in these zones will be highly tracked, and anything that happens outside is less relevant. This can help us create a relatively noise free data environment and focus on the insights that really matter and develop actionable insights.
It gets more interesting.
Reach out to us to discuss some of the Integna’s VR Analytics implementation
