So what web sites get 30+ page views on average? Then add the dimension of time. Maybe a site will achieve this metric on a one-off basis. But what site can claim to delivery 30+ page views week in, week out?
I know one. CircularCentral has consistently been able to drive over 30 page views every single Sunday which is the day of the week that the most activity happens since the weekly ad content. So four (4) months post launch, the trends continue to be rock solid. The biggest opportunity that the ShopLocal team sees with this type of high page views is to tie in display ads around the CircularCentral sites so as to help monetize this traffic.
Average number of page views per visitor that all of the live CircularCentral have generated since the widespread product launch at the beginning of April 2009. The rough average that has held over time has been 30 page views per visit!
If one was to focus in on just those visitors that looked at more than just one page (ShopLocal calls these multi-page visits), the performance story gets even stronger.
Average number of page views per multi-page visit that all of the live CircularCentral have generated since the widespread product launch at the beginning of April 2009. The rough average that has held over time has been 45 page views per multi-page visit!
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 Unlike all of the doom and gloom that has surrounded this measure being outdated in an age of web 2.0 technologies (such as Flash/Flex and AJAX), the ShopLocal team has instead made some innovative adjustments to what we consider to be a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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