Page Views No Longer Matter - Visit Length Becomes New Favorite

Jul 10th, 2007 by Leonid Shalimov | Scroll down for comments

The longtime industry standard for ranking web pages has been demolished. Nielsen/NetRatings is a leading online measurement service and this Tuesday they announced plans to scrap page views, making visit length on each page the more important factor. Online video and other new technologies are making page views obsolete so now the time spent per page is what matters.

Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers and investors a better picture of what sites are really popular.

A little blurb about the company:

NetRatings delivers leading Internet media and market research solutions, marketed globally under the Nielsen//NetRatings brand. With high quality, technology-driven products and services, Nielsen//NetRatings is the global standard for Internet audience measurement and premier source for online advertising intelligence, enabling clients to make informed business decisions regarding their Internet and digital strategies.

So what does this mean for us?

Some people might have to start re-thinking their strategies for keeping users on their site. More statistics companies will be making this move so this will soon become the networking norm around the web analyst tables.

“Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic,” said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen.

People are spending more time viewing videos and being entertained by flashy Ajax scripts rather then looking around pages (that’s the jist of it).

How soon will this really start to affect webmasters?

Who knows? But I can tell you one thing. Don’t worry too much about it now. Start shifting gears a little and focus more on readership and well written & presented content but don’t go overboard. To most people this change won’t matter but in my opinion it will be a very important factor to keep in mind when venturing into new online dot com projects.

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Leonid Shalimov posted this article under Traffic Tips, Search Engine Optimization on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 11:21 am You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site. View Technorati Linkbacks.