What Is A Page View Anymore These Days In The Land Of Web 2.0?

Posted on 8 January 2009 by Patrick FlanaganNo Comments

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Here at ShopLocal, the technology team’s top line metric of choice for accessing the volume or load of much content is being presented to web visitors is the page view.  Unlike all of the doom and gloom that has surrounded this measure being outdated in an age of web 2.0 technologies (such as  Flash/Flex and AJAX), the ShopLocal team has instead made some innovative adjustments to what we consider to be a page view so that this important metric stays relevant and accurate.

The page view metric is NOT dead here at ShopLocal, it just needed to be re-tooled to keep up with the latest web technologies.

At the original core of the page view metric, the idea was simple.  It was to be a measure of how involved web site visitors were.  The more web pages they looked at, the more engaged they were.  Nothing has changed in regards to what we are all trying to measure.  The only that has changes is the web technologies used to build web pages.

With these new (web 2.0) technologies, the web pages themselves are getting more efficient and pulling in and refreshing data and displaying this new content to the user without requiring a page refresh.  This is a great move forward, as it results in smoother and faster user interactions. But this causes some really tracking issues that must be dealt with.

So in order to create an apples to apples comparison of our older “web 1.0″ SmartCircular 2.0 site (static HTML web pages that would require a complete page reload to display new content) to our newer “web 2.0″ SmartCircular 4.1 sites (which utilize Flash/Flex technologies that only actual record one actual web page being loaded regardless of how much user activity, engagement or actions occur) the ShopLocal team now equates every user initiated click (or event in web analytic speak) or action taken that results in different data being displayed on the screen as a unique page view.  In the older web 1.0 days, each of these clicks would have caused the complete web page to reload, so even though the actual web (HTML) page itself does not refresh, the principle and metrics recorded are the same within the newer web 2.0 application.

Yes, at the 50,000 foot level that comScore and other measurement firms looks at sites, the page view is (and has been) dead.  If comScore is measuring the page views on a ShopLocal SmartCircular site like Target’s for example, I would fully expect them to register only one page view per visitor regardless of how much true activity the user performs within this Flash/Flex rich internet application (RIA) site.

But at the individual publisher level (which ShopLocal is), within web analytics systems (such as WebTrends or Omniture), page views can still be a very useful measure.  One must however implement very specific, granular event based tracking into all of the various web 2.0 RIAs one’s site so as to capture all of the user initiated actions that happen during a person’s visit to the site.  If this key and important step of tagging all of the intra-site activity is missed, then yes the page view metric for your organization is either dying or dead already.

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