Colin's Blog My thoughts on everything.

Page views are dead, now what?

If video killed the radio star, then AJAX killed the page view metric. There has been lots of chatter lately about the irrelevance of the page view (PV). I have to agree with the conclusion that PV is no longer a reliable way to measure user engagement. I'm so convinced that, in fact, I've switched to a new metric (at least in theory) that I haven't actually defined properly, though I did use it in a post yesterday.

Introducing... the interaction metric! Original, eh? It's not, really. People no longer simply browse the web or 'read' websites - they interact with them. Luckily, there's only one way that web user can interact with a website... do you know? Here's a hint: It's right under your index finger. The venerable mouse click!

That's right, interactions is really just a fancy way of saying clicks. It's an ideal way to measure the intensity of user engagement because it rolls form submissions (comments, etc), rating clicks, navigation into one metric and it includes what was formerly caught by the PV metric. It's also AJAX-proof, which is important in the era of rich internet applications.

Are there other alternatives? The most obvious existing metric that could be used in place of PV is time on site. Earlier this month Nielson/NetRatings announced that they would be replacing the PV metric with time on site and total visits. While I think both these metrics are useful, neither has the depth to replace PV as a benchmark metric. Time on site, in particular, has a major drawback in that we have no way of knowing what the user was doing during that time. I must spend close to 24 hours a day on Google, for example, since I almost always have 2 or 3 search result pages sitting open - idle - I may not even be in front the computer! Update: Jeremy Liew talked about PV vs. time spent the other day and noted some change in how sites would rank. Unfortunately, interaction stats aren't readily available to make the same comparisons.

The beauty of the interactions metric is that it measures activity within a visit or timeframe. It's also extensible into types that could, in theory, be measured independently. Navigation clicks, for example, tell an analyst something different than a search submission. But I digress, it is the aggregate interactions that tells the analyst something similar (and maybe better) than the trusty old page view did.

So, a formal definition, then?

The Interactions Metric is defined as the aggregate number of clicks performed by an authentic user for the purposes of navigation, content manipulation, form submission, etc. Interactions with ad units are not included.

R.I.P. dear old Page View.