Have you heard the page view is dead? In some circles people have moved on and it's very fashionable to make claims as such, but sadly much of the corporate world still sees it as an important number. Why? Benchmarking, specifically against other business units and various web properties within brands.
Don't get me wrong, we work with our clients to educate them that stats such as time on site, # of comments, # of inbound links, external media coverage are all major things to look at. But guess what, many times the sites they are benchmarked against internally don't have some of those metrics, that's where the page view becomes the lowest common denominator.
As measurement continues to evolve, specifically related to social media projects we focus on things like RSS subscribers, % of pass along and engagement to name a few. Another new focus is velocity. That is, how quickly is the information we're discussing being spread. Is it taking minutes, hours or days?
Then of course there are sales. What direct revenue is being generated from the site/blog? For some of our clients that's a key measure and we have to track that.
In the car world it's kind of like horsepower. How much you got? Yeah horsepower is nice, but then you start to think about torque, curb weight and other things that all contribute to the 0-60 time.
But it's always nice to throw out the big numbers, like a 451 horsepower AMG V8, or a corporate blog that's received 33 million page views and 100,000+ comments in the past twelve months.
In the next few weeks I plan to dive a bit deeper into the metrics we track and why.
Visitor Comments
Granted, it's lowest-common-denominator stuff, but aren't pageviews the building blocks of the other metrics? You need people to see the content before they can do everything else. Pageviews and visits run through conversion ratios to get to the other metrics, but you need an absolute metric to multiply by those ratios to get to the more useful metrics. Even the directly measure metrics, such as comments or sales, follow an initial pageview, so more pageviews are generally better than fewer.
Torque is great for 0-60, but if you want top speed, you need horsepower to overcome drag. Multiply by efficiency ratios throughout the system, and eventually you end up with available hp at the tire overcoming drag. You can improve all the ratios (a good thing) and focus on measuring outcomes (speed), but the original input remains important.
Posted by: Nathan Gilliatt | January 8, 2009 12:04 PM
Nathan, all good points. It's just the zealots that claim page views are dead always miss the point. Sure report all the other stuff, but if you're dealing with an organization and you don't report page views as part of your metrics you'll see your budget drift to other projects.
Posted by: JOsh Hallett | January 8, 2009 12:10 PM
Ah, it's the pragmatic metric with the binary scoring system. HIPPO: Are they reporting the metric I expect to see (yes|no)? :-)
Posted by: Nathan Gilliatt | January 8, 2009 2:46 PM
Really interesting and helpful post. Thank you.
Posted by: Heidi | January 8, 2009 6:40 PM