The page view quandary
How exactly are we supposed to accurately measure the popularity of Web sites?
Is it through unique visitors, page views, time spent on a site? Most likely, it will be all three of those metrics. It’s extremely important to figure out a cogent way of measuring a Web site’s popularity, especially for newspapers and other media organizations.
Understanding a Web site’s metrics is the best way to be able to convince advertisers of the worthiness of a product. You look at how many more people typically view a newspaper’s Web site every month over who actually read the print edition and its puzzling because the print edition makes so much more on ads.
A better understanding and utilization of Web metrics could help to greatly bridge that gap. It’s important for all organizations to have a strong grasp of Web metrics, make them readily available and utilizing the best metrics for their individual site.
Never ask about hits. They never were and never will be relevant. Page views might be going the way of the hit, but the debate is still up in the air. The relevance of each metric varies greatly on the architecture of a Web site. Ajax, Flash and other dynamic technologies are changing how we have to think about Web traffic.
The Online Journalism Review has a good article about the subject:
Web veterans will remember when “hits” were the preferred term for describing a website’s popularity. (Please see OJR’s glossary of online news terms for an explanation of the difference between “hits” and “page views.”) Slick webmasters soon figured they could inflate their “hits” simply by loading their pages with dozens of graphic files, so “page views” have been since the late 1990s the preferred metric for describing how much content a website has served to its readers.
But readers don’t need to load a different page (i.e. a new URL) to see new content anymore. AJAX-powered webpages can serve up “page” after “page” of fresh content while on the same URL. And a single YouTube URL can keep a viewer watching for several minutes. Today, a huge “page view” count is as worthless as a huge “hit” count in confirming a site’s popularity.
In the Ajax and video era, time spent on a site will become a more important statistic. Hopefully, Web designers and publishers will embrace and add it to their arsenals. It’s also important to have good, quality third-party stat tracking to show advertisers.
I have a couple of different services that monitor my traffic (Webalizer being the main one). Google Analytics is a good one for most Web sites, and Feedburner is great for blogs. Both are free. If you need more power, there are a myriad of services you can purchase.
Nielsen/NetRatings recently launched a new way of measuring Web traffic and it put AOL ahead of everyone else in the U.S. in May. AOL?!?!
Yep, with new and more in depth stat tracking (they now track “total minutes” on a site), it turns out AOL isn’t doing as bad as many people had thought. The article does caution, however, that not all sites should be measured the same way.
That’s why everyone needs to measure a myriad of metrics.
The two stats I watch the most are unique visitors and RSS subscribers. I primarily use my data to figure out which kinds of content are popular with readers. But it all depends on your market and the kind of site you have.
Everyone should care about unique visitors. It is, and probably always will be, the most important stat for any Web site, especially a content provider.
Page views are a good way of measuring how many parts of your site a person views, but newspapers in particular have abused this. Many newspapers force you to click over several pages just to view the same story (if you have to click on five pages to read one story, it will greatly inflate page view statistics). That kind of dishonestly is one reason unique visitors is better.
Time spent on a site also gets through the dishonesty. It shows advertisers not how many hoops (clicks) you make users to get through to view your content, but rather it shows them how long they spend each time they come to your site. This becomes increasingly important when people watch video or are on sites that make heavy use of Ajax or Flash.
If I go to cnn.com, I could spend 10 minutes watching one video, but it only counts as one page view. Clearly those 10 minutes are a big advertising opportunity for CNN.
This is why it is important for all Web sites to track a myriad of metrics and present the most relevant ones to advertisers. In addition, newspapers and media sites need to be forthcoming with statistics. Ultimately, advertisers will be more willing to work with transparent organizations.
Getting away from page views will also help attract more users to newspaper Web sites. Newspapers have forced users to go through a lot of hoops to inflate statistics. This leads to hard to navigate sites and user frustration.
Most people are not happy with the current state of news Web sites. They are way overcrowded, hard to navigate and a lot content is buried. Home pages have become a wall of information.
Look at how popular the Drudge Report is. It is so much easier to use than any other media Web site. A Web site that is easy and logical to navigate will build a stronger, more dedicated following.
Newspapers will no longer need to force users to click on a lot of pages just to view content because time spent on a Web site can replace page views. I agree that reading a 5,000-word story is probably worth more than one page view, but now we don’t need to worry about that because we can figure out how long a user is on each page.
It’s a better measurement and our users will thank us if we harness it properly. Web sites need to get easier to use. One reason I like CNN’s new Web site so much is because it is so clean and easy to use.
It’s the exact opposite of most newspaper Web sites.
Drudge and CNN are the two places I go the most, and it’s easy to see why.