The Page view is all but dead as a metric for measuring the success of a website. Despite many companies pushing to get them higher and higher to satisfy the demands of advertising agencies - as explained in this article from RRW , it seems that even engagement as a metric has it’s short comings . Even Microsoft have weighed in with “engagement mapping” .
What is clear here is that Page Views are almost meaningless except as an indicator for server loads, and engagement is a fluffy term that lacks a clear relation to a company’s goals. It would seem that the one metric to rule them all approach might be a pipe dream for people that would love to be able to apply apples to apples comparisons of things that are clearly apples and oranges. True, the core metric to measure those by should be nutritional value, but well all know that colour, weight, smell and taste contribute to our apples and oranges decisions.
Is there a nutritional value of a website to the users that rely on it?
Ultimately, it may lie purely in the ROI, the return on investment. For Google, there are two major stake holders - the searchers and the marketers. For searchers, they invest their time (very little) and are returned very well targeted information. Here you need a metric for the information quality (like a quality score) and possibly a monetary valuation of time (as we all know T=$).
For the marketer, they invest Time and Money, and they are returned Impressions and Clicks. The market then tries to map these to visits, and then this to conversions, then to a ROI (actually ignoring the time component).
For each website, the way the stakeholders map their ROI will always be different, and measurements of Page Views, Time Spent on site etc have always been proxies for determining what this one core metric for capitalist nutritional value is. Time spent per visit is great for Facebook, less so for Google. Number of visits is great for Google, less so for YouTube (see Why visitors is a misleading metric).
ROI comes with conversion, finding the correct proxies for this are going to be different in different media. Things like user reviews and ratings will be helpful indicators as we close in on the ultimate conversion goal. For now we must find the metrics that are the best proxies for narrowing in on this goal, and this is going to have to vary - but the bottom line of this IS the bottom line.
When using a medium for advertising that can’t track down to conversions (which is ultimately the right success metrics for a business) it is important to find the right metric to measure ROI. It should be simple to understand, and accurately contain a measurement of the goal you are looking for.
Traditionally, newspapers have used “Readership” and “Circulation” as a proxy for measuring advertising effectiveness - however, this is merely a measure of reach - not of advertising effectiveness. Similarly, TV has be measured by similar metrics that were calculated in an even more dubious manner - without any kind of third party auditing. The has always been allegations of “dumping” to inflate figures.
So when is advertising effective? It is most effective when it converts, next would be when it elicits a reaction from a reader/ viewer, and still further from the goal would be when it reaches a reader/ viewers eye balls and communicates a message.
So with traditional media - none of these three are measured, all that is measured is how much air time, how many newspapers your ad was in, and you are charged by that amount as a factor of the publication reach.
With digital media, if the digital chain isn’t broken, you get all three. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Impression (CPM) respectively.
Offer Impressions and Offer Interactions are essentially a measure of Impressions and Clicks respectively.
Offer Interactions – Every time a user interacts (or clicks) with an offer
Offer Impression – Every time an offer is loaded onto a users screen and it isn’t interacted with.
It is important to use the right metrics for the job because as the Web changes, things like “Time Spent on site” and “Page Views” may become irrelevant as information delivery and Web page design becomes more efficient. However, the Offer Impressions and Interactions should always go higher if a communication advertising platform is to be effective.
Google has proved itself time and time again when it comes to delivering accurate search results. Most of the time, their accuracy is being improved by how they innovate in restructuring the web to make it easier for their crawler to understand. Often, they leverage the symbiotic nature of users of the web and the web itself.
By being the providers of valuable tools, Google can then better understand the information that relies on the standardised structure of the information using those tools.
Examples of this can be seen with Google Analytics, Sitemaps and to a somewhat lesser extent, Google Webmaster Tools. Page rank was used in a similar way to manipulate SEO methods to the advantage of Google.
Their latest innovation in this area is the Google Chart API.
This allows people to code charts with just a URL, and from the structure of that URL, Google can understand all of the data contained within it. All of a sudden, the information that once sat within the images of this blog, can now be unlocked through Google’s search engine.
So, to demonstrate, here is a quick graph of Lasoo’s first month of growth.
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
chs=300x200
&chd=t:0.0,12.0,72.0,72.0,100.0
&cht=lc
&chxt=x,y
&chxl=0:|03Nov|10Nov|17Nov|24Nov|1Dec|1:||Market%20Share(.25%)
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