Jul 18th, 2007
The Mighty, Mighty Page View
The “page view is dead” conversation came back up thanks to Nielsen’s announcement that they would add Time on Site to their measures of audience engagement. Here is my rather late contribution to the conversation. Honestly, even though it makes for a great blog title, I wish people would stop saying that the page view is dead. It’s like saying that HTML is obsolete (perhaps it is, but it’s still all over the InterWeb)!
While the page view may be replaced as a means of comparing user engagement for competitive analysis (as it rightly ought to), it in no way changes the importance of the page view as a success metric for your own website measurement.
A good analytics implementation will always measure the things that your site’s visitors do that you consider to be “success events”. Generally, success events are those things that make you money. If you’re selling software, it’s purchases and/or trial downloads. For a media site, it’s the ad impression. Traditionally, the page view has stood in as a substitute for ad impressions as a success metric for media sites because ad impressions are tracked through different systems, and it has historically been difficult to integrate ad server data into web analytics tools. However, that is changing, and web analytics vendors now make it easier to upload data from external sources.
A good analytics implementation also measures the user behaviors that lead up to the success events. Path analysis, in its various forms, is essential to understanding a user’s navigation through your site and the things that lead up to a success event. For media sites, path analysis is even more important as we try to understand what the most popular types of content are, and how they relate with each other to increase site “stickiness” (increased time on site), and “loyalty” (repeat visits). The page view is central to path analysis, and even though our definition of what a page view is may change as a result of rich media in its various forms, you’ll still see the page view as central to your path analysis.
On the other hand, as our ability to track site success more specifically increases, the value of the page view as a key performance indicator may diminish. We’re all trying to measure our site’s return on investment, and as we are more able to track those things that directly make us money (display ad impressions, pre-roll video ads, transfer to affiliate sites, etc.), the page view is no longer as necessary as a proxy for those things. So instead of “Page Views per Visit” as a key metric, we might find ourselves looking at “ad impressions per visit”, or even better - “revenue per visit” as our key measurements.
But remember that the page view is still a critical component of understanding user navigation and as a way of inferring users’ interests. So even if we rely less on the page view as a KPI, it’s still one of the central measurements of user behavior overall.
As rich media confuses the “definition” of a page view, it becomes difficult to provide a standard comparative measurement that applies consistently across different websites. So competitive measurement must begin to rely on those other success measurements, such as time on site, or market share of visitors. I expect that trend to increase as technical innovation continues to confuse the technical definition of the page view, and Nielsen is certainly leading the way in this trend. It will be very interesting to see comScore’s reaction to Nielsen’s announcement.
In sum, I still think that the “page view is dead” idea is over-hyped. Even though I suspect that the page view’s days are numbered for KPIs and competitive analysis, I expect the page view to mature and evolve rather than to go away as an important part of website measurement and optimization.