Nieslen finally understands Page View is not ruling anymore

I wrote a post a few months ago, inspired by a post from Steve Rubel on the "Death of Page View".  I was writing

I think it is about time marketers and media agency pay more (REALLY MORE) attention to other parameters like loyalty/churn, user lifetime, time spent on website, time spent per page, ability to lead conversion, level of influence, advertising memory and awareness generation, and other things that we are discovering as we speak.

I am happy to see that Nielsen, a leading online metrics company, has just announced they will finally rank websites according to something else than just page views which is for me far from being a good indicator for evaluating a media and a company.

Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.

I am not saying measuring page views is useless but ranking companies by page view as an indicator of quality is less and less relevant for at least two reasons

• More and more websites use technologies like ajax which saves page refresh
• More and more companies game the system by artificially forcing users to see more pages or use a auto-refresh rate of pages that will increase the counter (think Facebook invitation system)

In the short term some big companies are going to suffer from this, i believe Google will be first, but in the long run i think it will be a fair way to analyze the web.

I hope other metrics company will go the same way (Comscore is starting to do it too, HitWise,...).

Finally i believe a new need will be to measure the traffic of a web property outside its native website and obviously page view will be totally irrelevant : i am referring to widgets of course which enable user to use a service without having to go to the service or even open your browser. Quantcast has just announced they would do that. But i would prefer more reliable 3rd parties which are de facto used in media department to do that also

Technorati Tags: nielsen, metrics, quantcast, page view, statistics

Comments

[Jeff K]

For those of us that are in the web analytics space, the concept of the page view as a stand-alone, key metric has been in the decline for quite sometime. Page View in context with measurable metrics is still relevant, but this will be largely dependent on the individual organizations.

"Time spent" measures are in my opinion are just as flawed and don't tell the real story of the visitor's intent on a site.

For example, while I read this post and now writing my comment, I have multiple other sites open either on this browser (via tabs) or in separate browsers windows. What can a site operator or online marketing manager glean from my visit (session) if they are trying to use data to optimize the site or produce relevant content?

I agree that implementations of newer technologies (i.e. Ajax) make page views more and more irrelevant, but it also makes it a challenge for site owners and vendors (i.e. Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, etc) to properly track visitor or visit-based information that is consumable to end-users of the organization.

Instead of page view, what is really taking place on the "page" is a series of events by the visitor. Organizations now need to figure out which events are the ones that should be analyzed. The web analytic vendors are starting to offer the ability to track Web 2.0 (Oy, I hate that term) events, but they are not quite there yet.

Regarding your comment about Widgets. What do you mean by "reliable 3rd parties which are de facto used in media department"?

[Florida Vacation]

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