Thursday, March 15th, 2007
Visits, not page views
Category: Advertising, Business
Not for the first time, alternative models to page views are in the news.
This time, comScore has announced a new “visits” metric. “AJAX” is cited as one of the motivations.
comScore Media Metrix today released its monthly analysis of U.S. consumer activity at top online properties and categories for February 2007 and introduced a new suite of metrics based on site visits. The visits metric, defined as the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes, is a way of measuring the frequency with which a person views content, thereby illustrating a key component of user engagement. Included among the new suite of metrics are: total visits, average minutes per visit, average visits per visitor, and average visits per usage day.
As technologies like AJAX change the Internet landscape, certain measures of engagement, such as page views, are diminishing in significance for many Web properties, said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. The introduction of these new metrics based on visits provides an alternative for measuring user engagement that tells us how frequently visitors are actually returning to the site to view more content.
But, how do you track visits from say… an AOL user?
Big whoop! Compete.com and others have been reporting on this metric called “sessions” for more than 6yrs. Plus you can get this data for free on Compete…
Visits is a standard measure from any web analytics vendor. We (Nielsen//NetRatings) have had this for years. What could be ‘new’ is that people are putting more emphasis on this metric to measure engagement. Page impressions is no longer the only metric to boast about. Impressions, page and session duration, unique browsers, session and demographics can all be used to define unique selling points for a site.
@Phill: Using a page tagging methodology such as NetRaings SiteCensus or Google Analytics allows you to measure unique browsers/sessions by cookies instead of via IP address.
This is news? And what does it have to do with AJAX besides the term showing up once in the copy.
“And what does it have to do with AJAX besides the term showing up once in the copy.”
Everything
I’m with Glen and David on this one. Visits are nothing new… but second generation web technologies are highlighting the need for an evolution of thought around measuring success and value online. If you like, check out my latest post on the my site ‘semsamurai ‘ “Web 2.0 killed the Ad Impression Star!”, I’ve gone into my views on the subject in detail.
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Very nice article.
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Great artical
I found it very intresting
thanks a lot