Replace meaningless metrics
Danny Sanchez at Journalistopia sums up the decision to quit using page views to measure Web site success. This is a great move for all involved, in my opinion.
Measuring the amount of time each site visitor spends on your site means you’ll be measuring whether people actually find value in your site.
Say I go to site “A” and view eight pages, but I never stay on one page longer than 2 seconds (because I don’t see anything that interests me). I go to site “B” and view only two pages, but I spend 8 minutes on each page.
Current page view metrics say that site “A” is better, more trafficked.
I say that’s just stupid, because on site “A,” I consumed no content or advertising.
As Danny said, using time spent as your chief metric means you will get credit if people hang out watching videos on your site, or interacting in discussion forums.
And as Richard MacManus said at Read/Write Web:
It’s not yet a totally satisfying change, because with the likes of Google you want to somehow measure relevancy and with blogs you want to measure engagement. But it’s at least a step away from page views, which have become too easily exploited — not just by some blogs, but also by the likes of Facebook and MySpace (which both make the user go through extra clicks to get to what they want).
For me, that’s been the horrible thing about the page view metric — padding the numbers by adding unnecessary and highly annoying extra clicks to Web sites. Newspaper Web sites have been some of the worst offenders in this respect.
Update (July 14): The Inksniffer argues that the journalism biz should dump ABC and its whole outdated circulation-based view of the world.
Categories: teaching
But Mindy, what about those of us who sit at our computers with a dozen pages open at any one time, whilst we work on something else? Are we bumping up the time meaninglessly?
That’s a really good question, Adrian. How common is that practice? I know I do it, especially ever since Firefox added tabs.
that practice is very common . I bought this up some weeks back on Chuck Fadely’s yahoo group. Dirck Halstead was going to check it out with an expert on his staff, but never got back….
the question really does need answering
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Mato, are you subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/tojou ? It is working for me in Google Reader and in Bloglines. Check the URL you subscribed to!
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I reed RSS true RSS Reader and it’s not working. URL I use is ok.
Maybe you should try http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/feed instead?
It is working fine in the major readers and also here:
http://www.macloo.com/journalism/
And here:
http://www.journalism.co.uk/bestofblogs.php
Now is working fine. Thanks.
Hooray!
Calling page views “meaningless” is a bit premature. Calling hits meaningless has been true for a long time. I often have a dozen or more Web sites open at once in various browsers (Firefox and Safari) on multiple computers. Sometimes I leave them open for days until I get back to look at them. This item, for example, was in a tab for a couple of days until I had time to get back. Yes, could have used del.icio.us but didn’t.
So which stat is more meaningful:
– Page views (properly counted to include real users and not bots) that guarantee an ad has been loaded (even though it might not be seen by the user).
– Time spent on a site or page (even though that time is undoubtedly inflated at times because of multiple tabs open, an interrupting phone call, etc.)?
– Unique visitors (which could be multiple users on one computer or one user on multiple computers/browsers)?
– Total visits (which would seem to be accurate no matter what the other factors might be)?
Our newspaper company is emphasizing eyeballs at the moment, which means unique visitors. But we also just sold a whole lot of advertising based on page views/impressions. An entire industry is using page views.
Let’s not be so quick to toss it out.
Thanks for the Monty Python link, Andy.
My biggest complaint against page views remains the deliberate inflation of those numbers by means that actually make the visitor’s experience LESS pleasant and less satisfying.
When I go to non-news Web sites, I don’t have to click on five separate pages to finish reading something.
Mindy,
You are correct that “jumping” online stories is a sneaky way to boost page views and ad inventory. I see it more on magazine sites than newspaper sites, though I’m noticing it more there, too.
I guess that’s why we’ve been told to emphasize unique visitors. That, too, is less than satisfying.