Pageviews are Obsolete
Remember when web site traffic was talked about in terms of “hits”?
You’d read about how many millions of hits Netscape got per month and
other sites bragged about getting 30,000 hits a day. Eventually, we
moved away from the term hit because everyone realized it was pretty
meaningless.Pageviews replaced hits as the primary traffic metric not
just because they’re more meaningful, but because it also determined
how many ads could be served. Reach (number of unique visitors) is also
important, of course. comScore/Media Metrix uses uniques as its primary
metric, because mainstream advertisers want to reach a lot of people,
not just the same people over and over.But it’s this pageviews part that I think needs to be more seriously questioned.
They note that their reasoning includes the
design of the site, including, but not limited to, the introduction of
Ajax page loads inside. Even the lightest Ajax usage can have an effect
on the overall stats of your site. Most Ajax functionality is made to
replace going off to another page to perform a task, so each load of
that is lost - along with any ad dollars that might have come from it.
So, the real question he poses
is - “what’s a better measurement?” Is there a good way to integrate
this new kind of interfacing with our more traditional stats. How do
you explain to advertisers that just becaue your page views dropped
when putting in this new feature, it’s actually a good thing?
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