Death of a metric: Page Views... Born 2006... Interaction-based Metrics

Steve Rubel has a post discussing the eventual death of the page view. He suggests that by 2010, it will be gone. I suggest that it is already dead, and has been for a long time. In fact, when other's were "hating on" hits back in 1998, I was already "hating on" page views. Let me explain why.

When I began working on web sites with CKS in 1996, I somehow was put in charge of our analytics programs. I guess it is due to the fact that either: I am a sucker or because of my auditing background. So back in this Web 0 (yep, I said 0) era, everyone wanted to report hit counts. And so, everyday I generated reports with hits. And then after about a week, I realized something. It was so easy to make your hit count anything you want. Literally, I could take a web site and increase hits by 100x in one day. I didn't do it but explained to my management that this was a worthless metric. But Allen they said, this is what the industry uses. Oh well.

Then once everyone caught on, we (the industry), moved to page views. Again, a metric that can be manipulated. While not as easy, can be done in a jiffy. Look at a review on Cnet or a tutorial on Devshed sometime. Their page count is enormous because they split their stories and articles into mulriple pages. And not just one or two, but sometimes 10 pages, each with barely any content on them. So you must click from one to the next. There is 10 pageviews right there, for something that should be one or two. I am not against splitting up long articles but it should be reasonable!

I might date myself here, but I used the first version of Webtrends. I remember the sales pitch. And 10 years later, the log file reporting solutions are basically the exact same. At my previous employer, we decided to look at a new analytics package. We were using a combination of Webtrends and a ton of custom made applets to meet my needs and wants. Truth is, the majority of the companies who came in, were selling the same thing today that they sold in 1998.

Very similar to Steve, I believe that today, we need to completely throw away the old ways and methods. Burn them, stick a fork in them, they are done. I think that with the RSS feeds and with all of the new technologies that refresh pages on the fly, we need new analytics routines. Perhaps a metric that works with "action" or "interactions" - meaning how many people have done X task. For a content site, perhaps how many articles were viewed in a given time period. Or how many feed subscribers are actually active. I could (and probably will soon) go into more detail. Today the key is not so much about how many pages you view, but how you interact with a site.

Truth is, I love analytics. I love reporting. I can look at reports all day and night. I enjoy analyzing sites to determine if they are profitable or not, if they are actually receiving the traffic they should be, etc. I look forward to seeing how we evolve the analytics industry to try to bring it to a place where the numbers and metrics are something that we can use to compare site A to site B appropriately.

If anyone will be at Search Engine Strategies this week, and would like to chat about this, maybe we can get a roundtable going, or a meetup at a pub. First round is on me!