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Beyond Page Views - A Peak into Where Web Analytics is Headed
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I picked up this thread from GigaOM, which has picked it up from ComputerWorld. The reason why most Internet Pundits are trying to look beyond Page Views is that Nielsen had announced last July that they will no longer use Page Views as the primary rating mechanism for web sites.
Page views is a metric that has been around for a decade or so. It is the number of times web surfers call up web pages on a given site. This if a visitor comes on to watblog.com and visits the main page, then visits this article, then goes back to the main page, and visits another article – watblog.com will generate 4 page views from this user. Page views became popular in the late 1990s, because they were far superior to the existing measure of “hits”, also known as “file requests”. Hits are confusing because every graphic on a page, as well as the page itself, counts as a hit. If a site owner puts more graphics on his pages, he gets more hits, even if visitors, clicks and everything else stay the same. So far watblog.com has received about 40 lakh ‘hits’ which, even we know is a grossly overestimated figure [we do hope that we soon get 20 lakh unique visitors :)]
And its about time we moved away from Page Views primarily because page views became popular because media planners at the time were obsessed about pages and the revenue generated from each page (because they were working on newspapers and magazines with a relatively closed mind).
Another important thing to note about page views is that when a page automatically updates itself by reloading, it counts as another ‘page view’. All was well and media planners were solely concerned with page views till something odd happened. Certain web sites, which seemed perfectly healthy saw declines in terms of their page views (and they got worked up).
The explanation has to do with “Web 2.0”, and more specifically with a constituent technology called “asynchronous JavaScript and XML”, or AJAX. This is a method that lets web pages update parts of themselves—a news update, a share price ticker, a new post on your blog or an e-mail inbox, say—without having to reload and redraw the rest of the page. The result is that web pages now that behave less like documents and more like pieces of software. Only small amounts of data are exchanged with the server for a web page and thus the page becomes more responsive and also saves the owner of the web page a lot of bandwidth. But this means that a user of an AJAX page, such as Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Finance, can spend the entire day working on the same page, and this activity counts as only a single page view!
Now Nielsen has also gone on to say that it is also because of Online Video that Page Views are getting irrelevant.
And its obvious isn’t it - the more activity a user can undertake ‘in page’ - the smaller his incentive to move ‘out of page’.
So one could presume that one can measure “time spent on a site” and use that as a primary indicator. Well, the guys at Nielsen disagree. According to Scott Ross, Product Director of Nielsen’s Net View Internet Audience Measurement Tool, “Time Spent” hasn’t led to “widespread benefits” for those sites that heavily use AJAX”. Rather, the “time spent” metric has mostly benefited sites offering online video and/or slide shows, he noted.
Time Spent, i think was adopted because it is a measure of Engagement. Well now that it has been proven that Time Spent isn’t really an indicator of engagement, Nuconomy, an Israel based company has come up with a tool for analytics that is supposed to be moving towards semanticity. It includes everything from comments on blogs, ratings, track-backs from other sources on the web, applications shared with friends, time spent on video and audio, uploads etc.These interactions are measured then combined to get an “engagement” rank for each one of the web site’s users or content pieces. Since every business is unique, everyone will need to measure different things. With NuConomy, the formula of what engagement means to you can be adjusted, giving more wight to some things, and less to others.
The only problem with such an approach is that there will be no standard measure for all those large advertisers out there. What is engagement for a website may not be engagement for an advertiser. I know what all you website owners are thinking - ‘who cares? We know how to extract value from our audiences better than anyone else’ With this kind of an approach we will definitely move towards a better indicator of engagement, my only problem is that the variables can be tweaked to a particular websites favour - something that in the end might not provide too much value to advertisers in the end, which might lead to the downfall of this system. The counter argument to that would be that the advertiser knows exactly what kind of interaction and engagement he is getting so the system is more transparent and advertiser friendly. Nuconomy plans to offer its platform to bloggers for free btw 
I don’t think we can count out Page Views just yet. They provide a core to the entire media planning exercise (although admittedly it is shaky). Page views coupled with engagement can give a right balance of qualitative vs quantitative engagement.
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Hi Harshil.
I think you are right. Our approach and engagement measurement in general is something that takes us away from the one metric fits all.
If you look at our company blog and Avinash blog, you will see an interesting discussion in the comments around this.
I do think that some verticals can come up with one engagement metric. But there is no doubt that an e-commerce site and a social network have very different kind of engagement metrics.
It will be interesting to see, when tools like ours become more and more popular (especially when Google and Microsoft are slowly following our steps) if the blogosphere community will define a new measurement for itself, or should this job will be left for the IAB.
Shahar Nechmad
Nuconomy, CEO
I think that rating by webpage views is still a convenient rating mechanism for web sites. I mean when a certain website is clicked (be it through hyperlinks or entering the site via the URL), this will be an indicator that the web surfer expressed interest on the site. Then this would be a “plus” factor for the website owner.
Without this kind of rating mechanism, as what is said in the article, a kind of webpage bias will result. As what was stated: “…my only problem is that the variables can be tweaked to a particular websites favour - something that in the end might not provide too much value to advertisers in the end, which might lead to the downfall of this system”, we can see here that the methods that will be used other than page views might not be that effective. And also it will probably result to the downfall of online advertising, discouraging lots of website advertisers.
Hi Shahar,
Thanks for taking time out to comment on WATBlog. Yes, it definitely will be interesting to see if the blogosphere defines a new metric or not - i have a feeling it will.
To read Mr. Nechmad’s views you can go on to Nuconomy’s blog - the url is http://blog.nuconomy.com/
Some of his views on attention, engagement, and web metrics are very very interesting. You’ll also get to know a lot about Nuconomy - an interesting company to watch out for; WPP has invested in it and as MR Nechmad has already said, Google and Microsoft are venturing into engagement metrics as well (so effectively that make Nuconomy the thought leader in engagement metrics)
I particularly am a huge fan of his idea that traffic is dead.
interestingly MS’s recent launch of the display advertising platform is done in the page views manner. Possibly a step backward. they pitch their platform as a “brand building tool” that subtly influences the viewers. i cannot understand why would they opt for such a primitive metric.
@ mike - completely agree with you. It is a fact that a majority of websites lack engagement tools yet.
@ Jacob - i really havent heard of MS’s recent display dvertising platform launch.
i do know for a fact however, that their new digital standard digital campaign measurement tool has engagement mapping integrated.
Check out the link - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/feb08/02-25EngagementMappingPR.mspx
Also, if you could put up the link to the news announcing microsoft’s new ad platform it would be great
http://www.animationxpress.com/anex/y2k8/headlines/anex3005.htm
here is one of them.. possibly u will find keywords within this story to find other versions of this story
ohh u were talking about MDAS - which is India specific - we blogged about it as well… yea true - that is page view style. But think about it - they have tied up with indian distributors who are still stuck in the stone age of the internet - well atleast some of them. Further, how many indian sites are actually engagement oriented. A handful. Internationally we are seeing engagement mapping done. In India i see that coming to blogs 1st because the blogosphere is more receptive to new stuff, the big guys will probably catch on later. It will also tae some time for most indian internet media to become truly engaging as it is defined internationally today.