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Page views or time spent – hey Nielsen, both are worthless
So the big buzz over the past day is that Nielsen/Net Ratings will no longer use page views as their telling metric, replacing it with time spent on site. Yawn. My post yesterday describes the analytics apps we use on CN.
Let's take a brief look back at metrics. In the mid-90s, sites used "hits" as the primary metric. I remember the days at CKS when a newbie would run around the office talking about how many hits his or her client Web site received. I just laughed from my Aeron chair. Then to prove a point, I took a client site, added 100 blank images and the next day showed them why hits was a stupid metric. But I couldn't change the industry so I just kept working. I also remember beta testing the first WebTrends version and emailing the product team about how poor hits were as a metric. CKS rocked though.
Then in the late 90s, the shift moved to page views. Another joke of a metric. On the surface it seems better than hits, right? Now we are only counting each view of a page no matter how many images and other items are on it. Not so fast bub. In 1999, a large percentage of the big players realized that this could easily be manipulated by splitting content into multiple pages. There went page views.
Now comes word that Nielsen is moving to "time spent" as the default metric for reporting. Sounds good right? So if someone spends 10 minutes on my site, and only 5 on yours, my site should appear to rank higher, correct? Let's push out the easy issue here which is that sites are sometimes hard to navigate which will artifically raise your time spent on site. If you and I serve the same content but it's 40% easier to find it on my site vs. yours, then you appear bigger. Love that! Now we will see half-assed sites coming out just to scam this "new" metric.
Here is the real issue. We need to go back to the drawing board, erase everything we know about metrics and analytics and start over. Using a metric that has already been used and abused won't cut it. But Nielsen knows where their bread is buttered and when companies like Microsoft change their web site to reduce pageviews by 30-40% (by my estimation), the page views metric would have to be changed to satisfy their clients.
So how does this new metric reporting system handle YouTube with regards to watching videos? Is that considered time spent on site? Is an embedded video counted? What about RSS feeds and widgets? Content vs. application sites? It sure feels like Nielsen just put all of their currently tracked metrics into a hat and pulled one out.
Some others discussing the news:
- Scott Karp has an interesting perspective from the Google side of things. Scott notes that Google uses clicks as their metric.
- Andy Beal makes an excellent point about tabbed browsing – I hadn't thought of this!
The bottom line is simple – It's time for new standards and systems for reporting. As opposed to 1996, we have so many new ways of communicating and I would think starting the discussion should be easy. While it may take a long time for us to agree, let's get the conversation started.
Analytics such as pageviews, time spent on site, hits, etc. are only useful if you know what your goals are. Other analytics, such as screen resolutions, browser versions, etc. can be so much more helpful than the aforementioned items.
Truly, though, if you are not a for-profit Web site, the only way to really measure your effectiveness is to perform audits and focus groups. Knowing that 40,000 people visited my Web site doesn’t tell me whether the site is effective. It just tells me that my advertising directing them to the Web site was effective.
The new way to truly and effectively measure your Web site’s effectiveness is through mouse/eye movement studies.
I saw a study explaining the effectiveness of white space and short, meaningful content a few months ago. The study took a menu and made it into a Web page. They then made two versions; one with long, flowing text describing in great detail all of the menu items. The other had short, condensed text and a few extra pictures. Users spent something like 50-75% more time on the first, but came away with something like 40-50% more information from the second.
That throws the whole “time spent” theory right out the window.
Ben you make some good points about advertiser value. I don't think that your note about flash/ajax is 100% valid though as sites with higher usability will suffer. Why not just stick in another function to keep the user wandering around another 20 seconds? etc.
I sure hope we get to something better soon.
For the advertisers who use Nielsen’s service, what would be really valuable to know is ‘if I advertise here, who am I reaching, and how effectively am I reaching them?’ Let’s face it, all these HTTP, connection, and server metrics are just proxies for the real questions of advertiser value. So, barring eye-tracking systems and other invasive technologies, we have to make the best of the data we can gather.
I don’t think pageviews, visit length, or any other one metric is a perfect stand-in for advertiser value. Visit length does solve one problem (how to account for ajax/flash sites), at least, so in that sense I think it’s a step forward until we find something better.
love that comment matt!
I agree in every respect, that current metrics are pretty much worthless. But, am I a hypocrite for constantly checking my stats? :)
Fantastic post!
When it comes down to it all anyone really cares about is PPUPM, a new term just coined on the fly, Profit Per User Per Month. Who cares about how “sticky” a site is or how many page views it gets? Why beat around the bush with a bunch of meaningless statistics – we all know the bottom line is making money. :)
I think time spent is only valid for timing certain sites. social sites like facebook would be ideal canidates for this sort of stat.
I think a better measurement would be target audenice served right content (not sure how you’d measure it though).
I just closed a bunch of tabs only to discover this one has been open at least half an hour. Most likely longer because I went to the kitchen to prepare some chicken.
All six of those sites must be golden!