The Imminent Demise of the Page View

Underneath the Internet advertising economy is a key metric that dictates how properties are valued and how online media is bought and sold - the page view. While it's not the only way to measure the health of a site (time spent and unique users are among the others), it's still very popular. Unfortunately, the trusty page view is on life support and I give it four years to live.

This may sound like heresy to most of you. After all, the page view has served us well. It has established a universal way to measure web sites. However, the metric is about to become a moot point.

The page view does not offer a suitable way to measure the next generation of web sites. These sites will be built with Ajax, Flash and other interactive technologies that allow the user to conduct affairs all within a single web page - like Gmail or the Google Reader. This eliminates the need to click from one page to another. The widgetization of the web will only accelerate this.

This is a dirty little secret in the advertising business that no one wants to talk about. Media companies love to promote how many page views their properties get. They've used the data to build equity. They will fight it tooth and nail to protect it, perhaps by not embracing interactive technologies as quickly as they should. But that's not going to stop the revolution from coming.

Microsoft (an Edelman client) and Google are each pushing platforms that are very interactive and reduce the need to turn pages. Over time millions of users will grow to love these services. They will like how they can accomplish so much so quickly, without ever having to go anywhere else. Smart companies like ESPN and The New York Times get it so they're wisely establishing their own interactive platforms. But they're in the minority.

As the page view platform crumbles, there's going to be a shake out. Everyone is going to scramble to find a metric that helps them compete for ad dollars. Enjoy the show.

Comments

[Paul Fabretti]

Steve

With Ajax creating, like flash, a programe of sorts within a program, surely the opportunity will still remain for page views to be recorded.

Is it not just a matter of time before soemone is able to integrate analytics code into a flash or ajax-based website in order to meaure page views as well as so many more other metrics that Ajax interaction will allow? Maybe it is beign done already?

I don't think necessarily that page view is dying, more that the current method for measuring it is moving on.

[David]

Microsoft and Google don't seem to be doing anything to reduce the number of page views on major sites they have ads on - and even if they did, they'd have to use something, like ajax, to refresh the ads to either be more relevent if context-based or just a new ad if "cpm" based (however they want to measure that).

The medium sized publisher can't use ajax to reduce page views because they need the ads, and they can't use ajax to also reload an ad because most networks now consider that fraud; so until another standard comes around with heavy fraud protection (good luck), page views aren't going anywhere.

[Tim Harrison]

One metric that might solve the ajax/widget problem could be Viewing Time, the number of man-hours spent on a site per month.

For example, if 1000 people visited a site in one month and they each spent a total of 2 hours on the site that month, the Viewing Time would be 2000.

[Eric]

Another contribution to the death of the pageview are these ajax and javascript pre-loaders. I wrote about them here: http://www.marketing.fm/2006/11/17/pageviews-or-fakeviews/

There will be a growing importance on conversions, registrations, and real actions on a site vs. a display of a banner. Branding is important but sales always fix the big problems.

[Peter]

Small sites too. For example, sites running vBulletin software are already seeing less page views, as they impliment ajax for functions such as replying to a thread. I'd estimate sites running on it are already seeing 20-30% relative less page views.

[Rational Beaver]

Tools like Omniture have methods in place to measure interactive aps created in ajax, etc. They allow you to define a set of user actions that are recorded as events (big events or little events).

That's great for internal tracking purposes. The trouble arrives when you use those numbers for external reporting (how big and great you are). You can define those actions however you want, and that's going to make things messy.

[Ian Ketcheson]

Good point. Probably preaching to the choir, but a few days ago I wrote that:

"Social media success is not about hits. It comes from building on your existing relationships, making contributions to your community/network, increasing your influence through demonstrations of thought leadership, speaking with an engaging and “authentic” voice (although that is becoming an overused and often disingenuous cliché), and by ultimately creating compelling content."

http://ketcheson.net/2006/11/28/lessons-from-a-failed-social-media-experiment

[Andrew]

All of the big players: Omniture, WebTrends, Web Side Story and Coremetrics all have products for very detailed and accurate tracking of Flash and Ajax. I can't speak to the technology, but something having to do with events, query strings and embedded ASP

[Scott]

I agree that pageviews are, in fact, dead.

Rather the measuring pageviews, I think a better metric to monitor would be "interactions."

Interactions include a lot of different things:

1) Comments/message posts
2) Clicking share buttons (Digging or Send to Friend)
3) Signing up for something (newsletter)
4) Buying something
5) Asking for help (filling out a support or lead form)
Etc

Eventually you break down the interactions based on value to the website. For example, a comment is one level of important interaction, but it requires a greater level of commitment to buy something, for example.

[Shel Holtz]

Don't forget RSS. I read feeds and most often never look at the website. InfoWorld has long passed the point where more people are reading feeds than visiting the site. Another nail in the pageview's coffin.

[max]

Oh, ok, so it makes sense now. Despite that RSS is an incredible way to surf the net, albeit a geeky one - but not really that geeky, it does not get the launch it needs because the folks in the advertising department know that it will decrease page, subsequently decreasing revenue.

[EmergenceMedia]

Pageview is Already Dead. Pageviews are the "eye ball","mind share" buzz words that have become meaningless for a long while.

ROI and AJAX is helping bringing about its death. Its about "Business Actions" - Actions, Engagement, Relationship building - not raw traffic numbers.

My Posting from September:
Future of Analytics and the Fate of Page Centricity

Avinash Kauskik wrote about in September too:
5 Ecosystem Challenges for Web Analytics Vendors

[Mike Abundo]

Given how much time people spend on pages with Ajax and Flash on them, and how automated such applications can become, I figure "on-page time" will become the next big metric.

[Lloyd Budd]

You shuld not skip the interactive (as you type) spell checker built into Firefox 2, Microsoft Word and other applications, though I still often do to my chagrin.

[Steve Rubel]

Lloyd, I shuld have saw that I spelled should wrong. Thanks!

[Pramit]

Good post Steve. I wrote a post yesterday about Yahoo's attempts at discarding RSS where I said that pageviews are so old media.

http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2006/12/why-rss-will-rule.html

[Vincent]

Page Views is ok to remove, but what about unique visitors?? this is a good indicator that is not talked about in your article?

[Rusty]

Ver accurate. I think they'll have no other option but to change to some other business model, and I think it'll come sooner than you stated.

[Jory Des Jardins]

Steve! Thanks for reiterating what we as Publishers have often had to explain to advertisers. The page view no longer tells the whole story--hell, it didn't six years ago, when new sites closed portal deals to artificially blow their traffic to stratospheric levels (never updating their marketing materials when eyeballs never returned). I tell advertisers that entire discussions can happen in a page view, and is this worth the same as the errant click? And thanks, Shel, for mentioning RSS. This traffic has to be measured, and its worth should be multiplied at least threefold. These are your most loyal readers, and they aren't even tracked by many third-party ad servers! And then there are the blog mentions that result from a compelling ad campaign--those impressions are worth hundreds of dollars each, and yet they cost pennies.

The means of measuring influence has yet to catch up with the medium. We at BlogHer are eager to pursue this growing art until it becomes a science.

[Darren Herman]

Steve, very interesting thoughts here. Advertisers need a lowest-common-denominator measurement when making media buying decisions as to how they will measure their quantitative data. Pageviews have been this factor previously and probably will continue in the short term future. Ajax and other applications that are flavor of the moment will become very popular to advertisers once they all have a standard way of measuring the ads served or embedded on them. For this reason of scale, I do not think pageviews will go away so soon....

Remember, Google's PageRank algorithm is based on the effective numbers of pageviews per click ratio...

[jonathan]

Page view data should never be relied on to make an ad buying decision... CTR is the only thing that should matter to an advertiser.

[Allen]

Great article Steve. I posted my lengthy comments here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/death-of-page-views

If anyone is in Chicago for SES and would like to discuss metrics, I would be willing to host a roundtable discussion or a meetup at a pub. First round is on me!

[Noel]

>Page view data should never be relied on to make an ad buying decision... CTR is the only thing that should matter to an advertiser.

If I'm an advertiser, pageviews carry significant weight about establishing my brand.

[John Gray]

Media planners/buyers have never cared about pageviews, but rather uniques and impressions or more importantly success events (clicks, actions, etc.). The importance of the "death of the pageview" is more in the backend success metrics that are currently used to track campaigns that drive people to an advertiser's site. Currently many advertisers/agencies use page based pixel tracking to measure campaign success and that's going to have to change with the implementation of ajax and other Web 2.0 technologies. And since many of the pioneering companies have been embedding sophisticated tracking (ala events in Flash) into rich media ads for quite some time this shouldn't be too much of a leap.

[Jon]

Nice post. I think as the web evolves, the metrics will also. Media companies will learn to turn traffic stats, views downloads or the next hot thing into trackable (and bankable) number.

[Mike Abundo]

This post has encouraged me to put more Ajax on my blog. Thanks, Steve. :)

[Ted Rheingold]

I'd go so far as to say I think it'll take 5 or more years. Since the biggest ad-serving sites are still page-based environments and all the big advertisers and their agencies are still CPM-fixated it'll be sometime before they can find any other method they can get everyone to agree to. And by 'everyone' I mean advertisers, creatives and agencies, not publishers.

As much as Web2.0ers know the page is dead, there's hardly a non-page-based site in the top 1,000 sites right now. In the coming years, web2.0 companies that want advertising on their site will find themselves making page-like concessions so they can meet CPM-oriented requirements of their advertisers. It won't be the other way around.

[matteo]

There is one big hurdle for what you describe to actually happen: the World Wide Web is built on an "on demand" model where you point your browser to a certain website only when you want to check it out.

The internet is not ready to support hundreds of millions of widgets "always on" as the difference in traffic and load generated server-side is just not manageable.

Until a new (and more importantly VIABLE!) protocol arises for the efficient distribution of information updates in a "push" fashion, widgets and gadgets will stay confined on the minority of people desktops.

A p2p protocol for RSS maybe an interesting solution ...

matteo

[anusharaji]

when i tried to add ajax page navigation
i wondered the same
how will i know if the person really visited the post and spent time on it?
i luv ur post

[snowwrestler]

"Pageview" was always just a placeholder term for impression. On a static page they are the same thing. Now that pages can have an asynchronous UI, the concept will just evolve more explicity to impressions. Will the nomenclature migrate as well? As long as both parties know what's being measured it doesn't matter what it's called. On a magazine site it might still make semantic sense to refer to "pageviews." Whereas in GMail that obviously doesn't make as much sense.

A smart advertiser will take the time to understand what they're advertising on/in. That's always been true and it still is.

[Emma Parsons Cardiff]

Im not so sure PageView is dead! Long live PageView