Commentary

The Numbers Game

Web publishers are incorporating a host of new, user-friendly features. The problem is, the extras render “page views” irrelevant.

When the folks at CNNMoney.com were rebuilding the site, it was a no-brainer that consumers would prefer an application pushing the latest stock prices and news to their browsers, without forcing constant page reloading.

“We knew it would complicate our metrics, but when we went to focus groups and showed people, they loved it. It was off the charts,” says Vivek Shah, president of digital publishing for the Time Inc. Business and Finance Network. “The choice was easy. If you continue to deliver what users want, you’ll be rewarded in many ways.”

That hunch played out. When the first numbers came back after the site’s February relaunch, user delight in the new portfolio tool meant greater engagement, and more overall visits. “What we may have lost in people refreshing, we’re gaining in more people looking at stock quotes,” Shah says.

But, because AJAX-based applications requiring no page reloading now power nearly 30 percent of the site’s content, page views remained steady.  In other words, the gain in viewership wasn’t reflected in the all-important page-views metric.

As an ever louder chorus sounds the “death of the page view,” ad-driven sites like CNNMoney that rely on the page-view metric are seeking out new ways to give meaning to advertisers.

Veterans such as Tim Kopp, who directed interactive marketing at Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble and is now the chief marketing officer of analytics firm WebTrends, compares it to the debate on “hits” when the Web came to commercial prominence in the ’90s.“Everyone knew hits were not the right metric, yet that’s what everyone used,” Kopp says.

Driving the trend now is the growing use of AJAX, RSS and widgets. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) allows consumers to check e-mail, get directions, shop and more without refreshing a page. Freedom from the the page-by-page HTML model has resulted in a better consumer experience, but fewer page views

The effect of this streamlining surfaced last year when MySpace passed Yahoo in monthly page views. Yahoo execs attributed it to the introduction of AJAX to the home page. Its most significant use was for e-mail, making it possible for users to check messages without reloading the page, but eliminating multiple page views in the process.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is incorporated in the new Internet Explorer and Vista releases. So this tool for people who prefer to receive content in an RSS reader rather than go seek it out on a Web site is ready to go mainstream.

Also driving the trend is the escalation of distributed content through widgets — primarily JavaScript or Flash file interfaces that push content into mini-applications embedded on personal pages or a consumer’s desktop. Hundreds of these tools are available through galleries on Google and Yahoo, and increasing numbers of content sites are making them available for users to take.

Clearspring Technologies, the widget syndicator backed by AOL veterans Steve Case and Ted Leonsis, says its widgets are populating sites at a rate of 30 million per day. Its suite of tools includes one allowing users and advertisers to track deployment.

“The new role of companies is not to produce content and spoon-feed it to users,” says Hooman Radfar, Clearspring’s co-founder. “Their new role is to create tools people want and push them out so people can use them however they choose.”

Tackling measurement issues in the traditional page-view world — never mind the new one — already ranks at the top of the list of areas the Interactive Advertising Bureau is taking on this year, says new IAB president and CEO Randall Rothenberg. In his initial discussions with members, it emerged as the leading area of angst.

The IAB is actively looking at ways to audit the measurement houses. One manager of a site serving a niche demographic complained to a measurement firm about underreported traffic, which the manager attributed to the makeup of the firm’s measurement panel. The following week, the site’s reported traffic quadrupled.

The IAB is also studying how to deliver ad impressions in the IAB environment. In February, comScore Media Metrix introduced a new metric, the “site visit,” which looks at how many times during the day an individual returns to a site. In its first reported month, social-networking sites such as Facebook leapt to the top 10 using the metric.

The firm is not yet tracking widgets.

In the Avenue A/Razorfish Digital Outlook Report, Garrick Schmitt, the vice president of user experience, predicted marketers will shift to more telling statistics like reach, frequency and time spent. He expects a greater emphasis on user-initiated metrics like RSS subscriptions and widgets.

Time Inc.’s Shah agrees that repeat visits and total time spent may be the more indicative

measure. Shah is looking at ways to deliver impressions that will count in the IAB environment by issuing new ads only when the browser window is in focus and not minimized, or when mouse activity is detected through clicking, or some other page movement.

“It’s something we have to address,” says Marta Wohrle, senior vice president of digital media for Hachette Filipacchi. “Page views have been a proxy for impressions. If the technology is not creating page views, you need a new currency.”

Hachette’s upcoming point.click.home — a site all about decorating and home improvement — employs some tools and video that also don’t work on a page-view metrics basis. “You really have to sell them as sponsorship opportunities,” she says.

Schmitt of Avenue A/Razorfish anticipates the rise of time-based ad serving — meaning ads that refresh over a given span of time. He views it as appropriate to the larger volume of time users are spending consuming audio and video online.

On the user participation side, Schmitt predicts the rise of new metrics for social media as well — from counting comments to a page (or posts), to submissions of content/media to a site. “After all,” he says, “isn’t the property that causes the most conversation truly the most popular?”

“It’s all going to go this way anyway,” Shah says, “because it’s the right thing for the user.”

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