PlusOne – Marketing Musings

I was interested to read this at Time Spent: Nielson Moves From Away From Page Views

The Wall Street Journal’s (account required) reporters are top-notch journalists. Journalists are paid to ask the right questions. Yet today, while they report that Nielsen is shifting from page view metrics to time-spent metrics, nobody questions the absurdity.

According to the Journal:

“Page views have been a major barometer of a Web site’s popularity and help set advertising rates, but the measure is becoming less relevant. Online publishers and advertisers say page views don’t capture consumer loyalty to a site or reflect the increasing popularity of online video and new technology that automatically refreshes Web sites, thereby depressing page views.”

“Nielsen/NetRatings, in June will release what it calls “time-spent” data and stop issuing its rankings by page views. The New York company’s rival, ComScore Inc. said last month that it is emphasizing a measurement called “visits,” which takes into account the time people return to surf a Web site in a month.”

The argument has some validity I feel (though most who commented on the post on GrokDotCom did not) because the visitor value based on how many pages they visit is not relevant. If a site has 1000 pages, but there is excellent navigation, the visitor can find exactly the information they are after quickly and not get lost wading through other stuff, then the measure of how long they stay on specific pages is important.

The real challenge is how to properly measure time people are pro actively on the page and that the stats don’t get distorted by tabbed browsing allowing people to go to a different site and leave the original page open for perhaps many hours…

Your thoughts?

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