Heirs Still Fighting Over the Page View Estate
Good article in Computerworld this week called Life After Page Views: Web Analytics 2.0.
To sum up, the page view has been tossed into the Pythonesque "bring out your dead" cart by a lot of people, including me, in an article I wrote at ClickZ a year ago:
Page views have long been one of the Web's most reliable measurements. But because of technologies like AJAX, Flash, and RSS, a site can perform at engines better than ever and users can spend as much (or more) time on your site than ever before, but the page view count won't reflect it. Page views rely on Web 1.0's click-and-wait model. ...
Sites with an income model that relies on excellent search engine positioning and subsequent page views must be especially diligent in showing potential advertisers a true picture of the site's user experience. Whether it's shifting the influence of time spent on a site, adding script-based click tracking to internal AJAX applications, or something entirely different, a multifaceted approach to Web measurement is becoming more and more important for Web monetization.
So imagine how vindicated I felt when, last July, Nielsen / NetRatings decided to abandon the page view as the primary web analytics metric. From the CW article:
At the time, the Internet benchmarking firm cited the growing popularity of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or AJAX -- which can refresh content without completely reloading a Web page -- as the main reason for the change to measuring time spent on a site.
But it turns out that video, not AJAX widgetry, is the major culprit in the growing chasm between falling page views and climbing "time spent" online. All of which leaves us with the same question: How do we measure consumer engagement in a post-page-view web publishing landscape?
The article is a little too long to sum up quickly, so I do recommend the read. The basic issue is that companies like Nuconomy are trying to be the first out of the gates with new engagement-measuring metrics such as "comments added to blogs, ratings, applications shared with friends, clicks on ads and online video use -- all of which can show how 'engaged' a user is with a particular brand or product," while folks like Avinash Kaushik (Google Analytics guru and recent SEMMY winner) caution us against rushing out and arbitrarily defining concepts while totally abandoning concrete measurements.
"I am not saying don't create engaging experiences," he added. "[Just] don't use the term engagement, because it has been bastardized to the point that it doesn't mean anything."
More questions than answers, certainly, but that's not necessarily bad.