New Web Metric Likely To Hurt Google

StonyandCher write(s) with news that one of the largest Net measurement companies, Nielsen/NetRatings, is about to abandon page views as its primary metric for comparing sites. Instead the company will use total time spent on a site. The article notes, "This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there. 'It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,' said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings. 'Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'"

Comments

Ummm...

[SCHecklerX]

Not spending a lot of time on a search engine is a GOOD thing. It means the engine is doing what it is supposed to...direct you quickly to what you are looking for.

Re:But

[wish bot]

This was the rage about 10 years ago - pages had to become more 'sticky', or so marketing people told everyone. I think this led directly to the demise of the blink tag - no one could bear to look at blinking text for any period of time. You made a page more sticky by providing better and more in-depth content. What actually happened is that sites started splitting up content over 10 or 20 pages, alla ad-view-generating tech sites today. Prepare for unending mazes of content to make you stay much longer on one web site.

Re:Idiotic

[nacturation]

In my experience, most people don't bother to close their browser when they are done browsing. It's even worse for people used to tabbed browsing. How many times do you shut down the computer at night with tabs containing something you looked at with your morning coffee? I know I do as often as not. That doesn't matter. Assuming you don't have some kind of page refresh every n seconds, most analytics software have timeout values between page loads. If you don't close your browser and then come back the next morning and continue where you left off, the analytics software should see that it's been more than 30 minutes between page loads and consider it a new visit.

Re:But - well, what about sessions?

[HTH NE1]

Sessions is what they'll use- and it'll be what many analytics (google included) use for measuring time spent at a site.

Is that why I've been getting page views that take forever to close their connection? They're keeping a download incomplete so that they can measure when the client gives up as time visited per page?

Anyway, they shouldn't just abandon page hits for time spent. Lots of quick impressions should be just as valuable as a few long impressions, maybe even more so(1) depending on the type of ads being sold (static splash vs. animated flash).

(1) Spell-check says "moreso" isn't a word? I'm sure I've seen it before.