The Death of “Page Views” >> VijayWeb.com

The Death of “Page Views”

You may be wondering what happens if the web pages are dead. The excitement is on for Web 2.0 user experiences. Web 2.0 experiences are not limited to blogs, wikis, gadgets and other user generated content sites but also the regular portals and other shopping sites, and we are seeing a tremendous growth in marketers turning to web2.0 interactions.

Now, the greater deal for the marketers is to measure the web2.0 interactions. As most of these web 2.0 user experiences don’t necessarily load a new web page in the browser. Or the interaction, it used to happen before by going to a new page, now it can happen without leaving the current page you are on.

The current way of doing cookie-based page tracking may not be adequate to measure the complete activity on the web site. For example, if one can complete the entire shopping experience without leaving the store home page, there is no scope for measuring page level activities. We will only end up having one page view in this case. And, since many other metrics like stickiness, abandonment’s, entries, etc., are calculated out of “Page Views” metric, they all can not be calculated for the web 2.0 web sites. Here, the metric “Page Views” makes no use.

Page Views may be replaced with the new metric “Interactions”

With the web2.0 experiences, the metric page views sooner or later will vanish from the industry and I guess, the new metric “Interactions” will takes it place.

Webmasters and marketers are forced to measure the each interaction on the web page. In the same store example above, if we can tag each element on the store home page, we will be able to measure the complete activity like no. of interactions, average time spent on each element of the page, abandonment rate per element so on and so forth. We can convert all our regular metrics to web2.0 metrics which were previously calculated out of Page Views.

What’s the deal on “Engagement Metrics”?

Engagement metrics are typically mean “comments”,”subscriptions”,”wiki-updates”,”uploads”,”no. of times an image or video is shared” etc.,

These metrics have been in use for quite a number of years.
For example, if we go to any vbulletin forum, we can find no. of posts, no. of replies, no. of registered users reported on the forum site. And, another similar example is Yahoo Groups.

Engagement metrics are getting higher importance these days because the metric “Page View” and related metrics are disappearing in the web2.0 world.

The right metric for Web2.0 would be to measure “Interactions” in place of “Page Views”. Eventually, all other regular metrics can be calculated out of this new metric.