What should be measured - web pages viewed or events within a page?

Posted 25 August 2006 13:27pm by Bertie Stevenson with 1 comment

A RedEye seminar with Jim Sterne last week brought out lots of new discussion in the world of Web Analytics.

One of the things which sticks out for me is the emergence of new web design technology and the implications for measurment. 

The status quo has been that a person views a page, clicks on a link and views another page, with the analytics measuring the pages viewed by a person.

But with AJAX and websites using the latest advances in page creation - http://www.google.com/calendar is a good example - you can no longer measure in the same way because a person doesn't click from one page to another.

Instead, they view a single page and click on a number of events, actions or responses within the same page. 

This will have interesting implications for publishing sites who generate x million page views per month which is then translated into ad sales.

Will the media now be sold on clicks rather than pages views, or will they get more advanced to sell on number of unique people seeing ads and possibly against duration of exposure?

(This brings back the long standing issue around how to measure this responsibly and fairly given that each vendor's measurement numbers will be different from the others ....)

Many companies have only just persuaded their board to be happy reporting on page views rather than "hits" (also known as How Idiots Track Success), and now they may have to explain the importance of measuring events within a page.  

If you are interested in finding out more about the business case for Web 2.0, come along to our Web 2.0 seminar with E-consultancy CEO Ashley Friedlein on the 7 September.

Bertie Stevenson is Head of New Business at Web Analytics firm RedEye.