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Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Page views losing reliability
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With Web page views losing reliability as a major method of measuring audience, how will the industry evaluate a site’s effectiveness down the road?
The issue: The new Web 2.0 technologies can keep users on a site without having to refresh a page, hence sites lose page views even though users are actively engaged there. Some very good sites are losing significant page views because they are user-friendly.
And the trend will only continue. Newsweek reports that 2007 could be The Year of the Widget. Users more and more are dragging mini-programs to their desktops or personal Web pages with dynamic content that can update without generating page views. These mini-programs are everywhere you go online, from personalized Yahoo and Google home pages to businesses like UPS offering a package-tracking widget. Both Microsoft’s Vista and Apple’s Leopard operating systems will allow users to build widgets when released.
After announcing that MySpace had overtaken Yahoo in page views, audience analytics firm comScore acknowledged last week there was a problem: “The recent decline reported by comScore in Yahoo! Sites page views underscores another emerging issue in the Web metrics measurement industry. New technologies such as AJAX—which enable real-time site updates without needing to refresh a page—are impacting the relevance of page views as an accurate measure of the intensity of consumers’ Internet usage. Yahoo! in particular has begun implementing AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies across their sites.”
The company promised to develop new practices to adjust for the new technologies. However, comScore’s president and CEO Magid Abraham told Ars Technica, the technology blog, that page views will still be part of its metrics mix. Steve Rubel, a prominent industry blogger, thinks that’s a mistake. He writes that reliance on page views neglects the niche markets. “Marketers want to know about the influence circles within the niches that matter to them - and those niches are often tiny. The time is now for comScore to open up to the little guy.”
Why is this important? Page views have been the audience measurement standard of the online industry from the beginning. Content creators (including newspaper sites), advertisers and marketers have long focused on page views as the key indicator of success even though other metrics such as unique visitors or the number of pages a user views per visit are highly significant.
Just as the online industry has reinvented itself through such trends as social networking, now it has to re-evaluate how it will measure site traffic. Billions and billions of advertising dollars are at stake.
