Nielsen/NetRatings recently announced that they will scrap rankings
based on page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend on Web
sites.
So what does this all mean (and why did I use the title that I did)?
Much of this change is driven by the evolution of sites to Web 2.0,
or Rich Internet Applications (such as Ajax and Flash applications).
With these new technologies, the concept of a page starts to go away.
The web browser running on your pc has been similar to a dumb terminal
(yes, a dumb terminal, for those of you that were not around in the
80’s and early 90’s ask your Mom or Dad, or that gray haired guy down
the hall) simply presenting to you data from the web servers. With Rich
Internet Applications (RIA) your browser and PC start to interact with
you without going back to the server on every click. This creates a
better user experience, but we lose much of our traditional tracking of
page views. This new technology is causing measurement problems with
Nielsen/Net Ratings and its competitors along with the clickstream
analytic tools.
So, a change in the way we count may be required. Clearly page views
is losing its value. But does time spent on a site help us? According
to Nielsen/Net Ratings:
“’Total Minutes’ is the best engagement metric in this
initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair
measurement of Web sites using RIA and streaming media, but also of Web
environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as
online gaming and Internet applications,” said Scott Ross, director,
product marketing for the NetView service.
We are taking a step forward as we understand that page views is not an accurate metric anymore.
But all is not well in the world of metrics. Time spent on a site is
not a very good metric in most cases. If you are a retail site and one
consumer spends two minutes on your site and another one spends nine
minutes, what did we learn? Nothing. We don’t know if the shorter
duration visitor accomplished what they wanted and what the retailer
wanted. Same goes for the longer duration visit. Did they buy lots of
products in that session? Did they leave frustrated because they
couldn’t find what they were looking for and went to your competitor to
buy? So, when we start shifting our focus to time spent on a website we
are taking two steps back.
So what should we care about? What are the important metrics you need?
There is no doubt that there is value in behavioral metrics. The
behavioral metrics that are the most important are those that are
financial and transactional. And it is nice to know how many visitors,
what pages they viewed and how long they were on our site. But what we
should care about is were visitors able to accomplish what they wanted.
In other words, what level of satisfaction did a visitor have. And
their satisfaction will vary based on what they wanted to accomplish.
We also want to know what they are going to do next - are they going to
be a long term loyal customer.
So, as Nielsen/Net Rankings tries to shift our focus from page views
to time spent on a site — be cautious! The ultimate performance metric
is did we satisfy our site visitors.
