Worried about page views dying? Don't be.
I found myself thinking, “Are we really having this conversation?” today after reading Steve Rubel’s post today on “What will replace the allmighty page view?” where Mr. Rubel commented:
“The page view is on life support. It fails to capture all of the myriad of ways consumers engage in online activities without ever leaving a web page.“
Okaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
I suppose Steve is coming at this from a different perspective than anyone who works in the web analytics field, more-or-less looking at page views as a basis for comparing the relative value of one advertising opportunity to another. If that’s the case then yeah, page views are becoming increasingly limited in their utility.
But damn, as a web analytics professional, doesn’t all this talk about page views going the way of the Dodo bird just make your stomach feel all funny? Like, you know there are problems with the metric, but A) when compared to the other problems web site operators have vis-a-vis counting (cookie deletion, cookie blocking, poor implementations, caching, robots, lack of understanding, lack of interest) and B) when put in the context of the number of sites that still rely on good old fashioned HTML, don’t these proclamations seem a bit premature?
Is it just me? Maybe it’s just me …
Anyway, we can stop worrying about dying pages and dying page views now since the answer has been with us the whole time. It’s not unique visitors … too many problems with how unique visitors are counted, what with cookie deletion and some of the inaccuracies ascribed to panel-based services. It’s not time spent on site … the problems with this metric as the basis of comparison are many (connection speed, amount of content, quality of content, bathroom breaks, etc.)
It’s sessions.
Yep, sessions. Good old “start ’em with the first page view and stop ’em after 30 minutes of inactivity” sessions. And while they don’t necessarily solve the problem of how many impressions a site can serve (you need old fashioned web analytics for that), they provide a stable basis for comparison across sites:
- Sessions are defined by a widely-used and widely-understood standard, the 30 minute timeout between subsequent page views. Heck, in the web analytics industry, it’s pretty much the only standard we have …
- Sessions are counted once and only once when a visitor goes to a web site in a single web browser and are thusly not subject to inflation due to crappy web design or RIAs. No more complaints about MySpace!
- Sessions are time independent, except for the session timeout. You can click away all day and you’ll still only count one session, unless you walk away for 30 minutes and one second …
- Sessions mitigate out issues associated with error pages and the such, because again, the number of pages viewed is irrelevant after the visitor views the first page. Again, no more complaints about MySpace …
- Sessions are not affected by cookie deletion and are not always affected by cookie blocking. Whoopie! We can stop bugging out about cookie deletion …
- Sessions are not affected by users visiting sites from multiple web browsers, since regardless of location (home, work, etc.) the session is counted. Hurrah! No more massive over-counting of unique visitors during Fantasy Football season …
- Sessions can be counted even when the visitor is not on your web site, depending on what tracking technology you’re using and how it’s deployed. For example, a session can be counted when someone reads a post in their RSS reader …
- Sessions are easily tied back to relevant referring sources, such as advertising units, RSS feeds, search terms, etc. Yippie! Not only do we get more accurate counts, we know from where the sessions are originating …
Yep, good old fashioned sessions … who’da thunk it? You can call them “visits” if you’d like!
What’s better is that the reporting networks should just as easily be able to report on sessions as they do unique visitors. If they can report on “unique searches” and “time per person” and “page views” and all that, nothing should theoretically stop them from using “sessions” as the basis for reporting.
Clint Ivy pointed out to me that Hitwise uses sessions as the basis for their reporting platform, only they report however on percent market share and not the actual number of sessions which is almost certainly what advertisers would prefer to see. Neither of us were sure why they don’t give raw session counts, do any of you?
Just think of all the problems we can solve by using sessions to compare the popularity of web sites! No more complaints about newspaper sites reporting more unique visitors than live in the entire state. No more complaints about huge differences in reported numbers ascribed to cookie deletion. No more freaking out about inanimate objects dying …
What do you think? Am I crazy? Is it just me? As always, I welcome your comments.
