But now researchers at Microsoft may have found an easier way to track where people are looking as they browse the Web. The new process doesn't actually utilize eye-tracking hardware, but rather uses the position of the cursor as a stand-in - where your cursor moves, where you hover, and of course sometimes where you click. According to their research, the cursor's position as actually a pretty good sign of what you're looking at and what's important, particularly when it comes to search results.

By looking at cursor data at scale in conjunction with click data, the researchers contend that this information could help improve the search experience. Cursor data can be captured for uncommon search queries, for example, where relevance is hard to gauge because of infrequent clicks.

Also, it can help identify what's described as "good abandonment," when the search itself satisfies the user's query and a clickthrough is unnecessary. (This is different than a bad search abandonment where the user didn't find anything they were looking for.)

The tests for this study were done using just JavaScript code embedded client-side within the HTML source for the results page. The script is less than a 1 KB and so would have negligible impact on the page's loading time.

Before starting off a panic here about another new way in which websites are tracking us, it's important to note that the results of these studies are based on cursor movements at scale. In other words, this isn't about tracking an individual user's intents, but rather about analyzing those based on a large number. That might mean that this sort of thing becomes part of a standard analytics package.

But for now, it's just a proof-of-concept.

Photo credits: Flickr user Stuart Pilbrow

Google now also gives publishers the ability to provide their visitors with an extra level of privacy. Publishers can now choose to anonymize IP addresses sent to Google, so that a user's exact geographic location (which the IP address often reveals), will remain hidden.

Do You Care Enough to Opt Out?

Google promised to release this tool about two months ago. For publishers, this is obviously not an ideal situation, as they rely on accurate statistics to manage their sites and tweak their marketing efforts. But it remains to be seen how many users will actually install this plugin. According to Google spokesman Brian Richardson, who spoke to the Los Angeles Times earlier today, only one in 15 visitors to Google's Ads Preferences Manager actually decides to opt out of the personalized advertising program.

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us earlier this week, traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics tools help users get a good understanding of what a visitor is doing on your own site. This, however, doesn't tell you anything about the sites that influence your visitors and the actual value of these visitors for you business. After all, somebody who tends to visit auto blogs is far more likely to buy something from your auto parts site than somebody who doesn't show any interest in cars.

Sysomos wouldn't give us any details about how it tracks a user's behavior across the Internet. Bansal told us that the company doesn't use cookies and just places a small snippet of JavaScript code on the publisher's site. Thanks to the data Sysomos already has in its Heartbeat and MAP social media monitoring and analytics tools, the company can easily identify the ecosystem around a certain topic. How Sysomos can tell that one of your visitors also went your competitor's sites and read Autoblog earlier in the week remains Sysomos' secret, however.

For publishers and e-commerce sites, this also means that they can now keep a closer tap on their social media ROI. After tweaking Audience's scoring engine, marketers can now see exactly what the value of a given campaign on Twitter or the company's blog was. You can also see what blogs tend to bring the most valuable visitors to your site and then specifically target this audience.

We do have some lingering questions about how Sysomos can track a user's behavior across the Internet and the potential privacy implications of this, but there can't be any doubt that this will be a very popular tool among marketers, community managers and sales managers. Sysomos is currently testing Audience with a small group of beta testers and plans to open the service to all of its clients by the third quarter of 2010.

Note: Facebook will share more information about these new analytics features during an F8 breakout session at 3:30pm PT and we will update this post once we learn more. The new Insights page is already live and getting it to work involves nothing more than adding a short meta tag to your site.

Taking Web Analytics to the Next Level

This new service, according to Facebook, will give developers "detailed analytics about the demographics of [their] users." Today's web analytics systems like Google Analytics can give publishers detailed information about how many people come to a given site and where they came from. A developer who uses Facebook for Web Sites will be able to gather more detailed demographic information about these users.

With this update, Facebook Insights isn't just about Fan pages and Social Ads anymore (where Facebook already gives publishers very detailed demographic data), but it also allows publishers to track what happens to a link once it is shared.

Partly, this also connects to Facebook's new caching policy, which now allows developers to store their users' Facebook data permanently. Until today, developers who used Facebook Connect had to delete this data after 24 hours. Now, however, when users grant an application permission to store their profile data, they give these developers their age, location, gender, number of friends and a number of other data points about them.

The new version of Insights will also now show publishers and developers where traffic to a given Facebook application is coming from (both internal FB traffic and external referrers). In addition, developers can now see how many users declined to give an app permission to access their Facebook profiles.

Privacy Implications?

This update will surely have some interesting privacy implications. Thanks to the new permissions dialog, however, it should now be easier for users to see which information they will share with a third-party application.

"Forrester forecasts that US businesses will spend $953 million dollars on Web analytics software in 2014, with an average compound annual growth rate of 17%," the report reads. "Growth will emerge from unexpected places as the value proposition of Web analytics technology oscillates for sophisticated analytics users and becomes more welcoming for new entrants. Ultimately, Web analytics will become part of a broader array of integrated services supporting marketers."

This assessment is undoubtedly bleak, but researchers also identified a few growth factors in the world of web analytics. First, interactive marketing budgets are growing overall. Second, online media is by far the dominant channel. And any money spent on online marketing requires that someone, somewhere be held accountable, that metrics be identified and measures, and that processes be optimized. Forrester also offers the prediction that, given the availability and affordability of web analytics data, a secondary market will spring up to offer services showing companies opportunities for using said data, thus bridging the "action chasm" between knowledge and execution.

In looking at spending, Forrester sees a move away from licensed software and toward hosted web analytics solutions. Service fees will continue to generate revenue for the industry even during turbulent economies; web traffic certainly isn't slowing down, and neither is the need for capturing accurate data about that traffic. They also see this as a vibrant market for agencies and consultancies. Also, new entrants seeking web analytics for sites with moderate traffic will account for most of the growth in this area.

Finally, because of the availability of versatile, free analytics tools, vendors in this industry are (or need to think about) shifting from "a point solution to an underlying service embedded within broader marketing applications," wrote Forrester rep Jon Symons in an email this morning.

"The transformation will only have a positive effect as customer intelligence data will be shared more widely across organizations. Significant challenges remain however, including the need for human analysis of mountains of data, the ability to develop metrics that can tie to larger business objectives, and the necessity to integrate marketing and IT organizations in order to achieve true data integration."

The executive summary is on the Forrester site, and the full report is available for purchase there.