One Step Forward and Two Steps Back

Nielsen/NetRatings recently announced that they will scrap rankings based on page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend on Web sites.

So what does this all mean (and why did I use the title that I did)?

Much of this change is driven by the evolution of sites to Web 2.0, or Rich Internet Applications (such as Ajax and Flash applications). With these new technologies, the concept of a page starts to go away. The web browser running on your pc has been similar to a dumb terminal (yes, a dumb terminal, for those of you that were not around in the 80’s and early 90’s ask your Mom or Dad, or that gray haired guy down the hall) simply presenting to you data from the web servers. With Rich Internet Applications (RIA) your browser and PC start to interact with you without going back to the server on every click. This creates a better user experience, but we lose much of our traditional tracking of page views. This new technology is causing measurement problems with Nielsen/Net Ratings and its competitors along with the clickstream analytic tools.

So, a change in the way we count may be required. Clearly page views is losing its value. But does time spent on a site help us? According to Nielsen/Net Ratings:

“’Total Minutes’ is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using RIA and streaming media, but also of Web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and Internet applications,” said Scott Ross, director, product marketing for the NetView service.

We are taking a step forward as we understand that page views is not an accurate metric anymore.

But all is not well in the world of metrics. Time spent on a site is not a very good metric in most cases. If you are a retail site and one consumer spends two minutes on your site and another one spends nine minutes, what did we learn? Nothing. We don’t know if the shorter duration visitor accomplished what they wanted and what the retailer wanted. Same goes for the longer duration visit. Did they buy lots of products in that session? Did they leave frustrated because they couldn’t find what they were looking for and went to your competitor to buy? So, when we start shifting our focus to time spent on a website we are taking two steps back.

So what should we care about?  What are the important metrics you need?

There is no doubt that there is value in behavioral metrics. The behavioral metrics that are the most important are those that are financial and transactional. And it is nice to know how many visitors, what pages they viewed and how long they were on our site. But what we should care about is were visitors able to accomplish what they wanted. In other words, what level of satisfaction did a visitor have. And their satisfaction will vary based on what they wanted to accomplish. We also want to know what they are going to do next - are they going to be a long term loyal customer.

So, as Nielsen/Net Rankings tries to shift our focus from page views to time spent on a site — be cautious! The ultimate performance metric is did we satisfy our site visitors.