Who Reads Page 6 of Your White Paper?

Speaking to Keith Thompson of Vitrium Systems, I discovered that whether a white paper is a success is no longer a matter of how many downloads it gets.  That, of course, is largely a matter of good PR, good location on the vendor's web site (and good navigation), and a hot topic.  Whether anyone reads the thing -- much less whether they read the whole thing is quite another matter.

Vitrium first produced Protected pdf, a product that kept pdfs from being changed or copied.  It appealed to  higher ed.

But customers asked for a product that could give them metrics on pdf documents – who read them, what was read, the amount of time spent on a page.  Docmetrics is that product.

When people get pdfs today they either have to register (which they either refuse to do, abandoning their attempt to get the white paper or they give false info) or they simply click on "free" white papers and give no info – in either  case the pdf owner knows nothing about the reader.

Docmetrics inserts a survey into the pdf (which can be mandatory or not) usually at page 2 or 3.  I suspect my colleague Jared Spool, a UI expert, would say this was one of his seducible moments.  The reader has started to engage with the white paper and giving its owner a little information for the rest of its content seems like a good exchange.

This allows the pdf owners to ask a variety of questions in a customized form which may be required or optional.  Docmetrics places a cookie into instrumented documents so if a document is passed along the survey will be presented to additional readers.  Even if they skip the survey, information about their reading habits will be included in the Docmetrics reports.

Reports include both leads as well as information on pages read or skipped, how much time was spent on each page, and so forth.  (As a white paper writer, this sounds both very useful and a little scary!)

Vitrium has been marketing Docmetrics for six months and has over 100 clients.  About 55% of readers using pdfs instrumented with Docmetrics submit information.

The product has a wide range of pricing starting at $25 per month for a small firm with one pdf and up to 5 leads per month.  Volume pricing is available for large enterprises with thousands of documents (or thousands of readers).  Pricing can be less expensive if the vendor wants to capture reading information but not reader IDs (such as name, email address, and so forth) for leads.

Docmetrics is integrated with Salesforce.com so that a company that uses SalesForce for lead management will have survey data entered directly into its CRM files and salesmen notified of new leads.  Vitrium plans to offer integration with other CRM products.

Docmetrics is hosted at OpSource.  While they intend to offer the software as a service, it is also designed and supported so that they can offer it within the firewall, should a large customer prefer to run it themselves.

At this time, they appear to be the only vendor with this type of product; they feel the barrier to entry is high since it requires intimate knowledge of Adobe pdf, Flash, and each Adobe Reader version as it comes into the market.