Letter: Page views are going the way of HITS

(How Idiots Track Success)

According to Beta News in the US, this week’s comScore Media Metrix report revealed that page views for social networking site MySpace were estimated at 38.7 million for the month of November - beating Yahoo by 600,000. What the findings did not highlight was that Yahoo has recently moved to add some AJAX-driven pages, potentially reducing the number of complete page refreshes per user.

AJAX technologies improve user experience by reducing the number of full page loads, but they also cut the number of traditional page views tracked by many analytics tools - thereby fundamentally changing web analytics and creating big problems for media companies in particular.

Why? Because media companies use page views along with unique visitors (another highly flawed metric) to sell online advertising.  Change however, is definitely underway in the media sector. Last week the ABCe removed the mandatory requirement for media owners to supply page view information, thereby acknowledging the fact that it is not the most meaningful statistic. 

If you’re not a media company you have nothing to worry about, as the number of page views are NOT a measure of the business impact of a website. Yes, many organisations do report on the number of pages viewed per month, or the number of pages viewed per session, but these do not prove that a website is delivering value to the business.

Web analytics has now moved on - the type of page viewed, the particular links clicked on and the level of engagement are all far more relevant to delivering better business value. The proportion of visits that get to the heart of the business proposition – the product pages typically – is a far more powerful number.

In addition, if you need to improve the effectiveness of a website, it is important to track events by specific segment. Which type of customer is getting to the product pages, and what actions are they taking when they get there? These are the questions you need to ask, the number of page views is irrelevant.

However, if you really do need to track page views, AJAX is not a problem providing you get a properly configured analytics tool that allows you to track all AJAX interactions. There is a myth that ‘Flash cannot be tracked by web analytics’ and as all the serious analytics vendors will tell you this is simply not true! High quality web analytics companies have been able to track interactions with Flash applications for years, and the same basic approach works for AJAX.

Matthew Tod
CEO, Logan Tod & Co.