eBuzz - Good-bye, Page Views

Good-bye, Page Views

One of the U.S.'s largest Internet benchmarking companies has announced that it will no longer use page views as its primary metric for comparing sites: Nielsen/NetRatings has announced that it will immediately begin using total time spent by users of a site as its primary measurement metric.

The change is due to the mounting prevalence of AJAX use, which allows a website to refresh without reloading the entire site content, as well as to the growing prevalence of the use of streaming video.

"It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement," says Scott Ross, director of marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings. "Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, 'How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?'"

What does that mean for us? It could affect Google’s ranking system, because while visitors may visit a site often, they may not necessarily stay there for long at a time. Page views, in the new Web 2.0 world, are a less accurate way of measuring total site traffic.

On the other hand, a person might spend a great deal of time on a newspaper site without making a purchase. Most of search is about driving customers to commercial sites, so the length of time spent on a site is not necessarily indicative of whether that site is successful in commercial terms.

Time will tell whether this actually changes anything in the search world, but it’s certainly something worth watching.

And that's our take on the news today!

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