Les Jones

E-commerce > Nielsen NetRatings: "Say goodbye to the page view as an ad metric"

Via Nielsen NetRatings via the Wall Street Journal via Terry Heaton via Instapundit*:

“The page view has been the traditional measure for advertisers to compare which websites provide the most opportunities to display their ads to consumers. The large portals and social networking sites tend to dominate this way of looking at engagement.”

“However, as the technology that publishers use to deliver content to the user moves away from static, reloaded pages to be more streamlined content-e.g. online videos- the page view is becoming a less relevant gauge of where might be the best place to advertise online.”

“Consequently advertisers will have to look at other metrics, such as time spent or visits, to see where their online ad pound might be best spent.”

For my blog and for the Web site I run for a living I only pay attention to visitor counts. Pageviews are too easily inflated. You can make your navigation circuitous. You can split pages into smaller pages. You can make people click a link on the front page to read the final paragraph on another page. You can do lots of things that inflate your pageviews while frustrating your visitors.

I quit using the open source Analog log analyser and statistics package because it didn't count visitors. Analog's author has some perfectly valid arguments for why measuring visitors will never be perfectly accurate, and why he prefers pageviews. I can accept less than 100% accuracy in visitor counts. What I couldn't accept is the failure to even attempt a reasonable estimate of visitors. And as the above Nielsen report notes, pageviews aren't the gold standard of accuracy, either.

* It's funny to see how information travels, innit?