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Posted March 7th, 2007 at 3:34 pm by Peter Daboll, Chief of Insights

 6 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

Back in December, I predicted the eventual demise of “page views” as an online measurement tool - one that’s out of synch with today’s dynamic Web. I called for new metrics that are more representative of true activity, especially with increasing integration of video and cool technologies like Ajax and Flash. A new metric has recently emerged in that I think is worth noting.

comScore just introduced “visits,” a metric that counts the number of times people visit a site per day. Sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s an important evolution of their existing “frequency” measurement, which only captures the average number of days people visit a site per month. While that’s relevant data, it doesn’t quantify how engaged people really are in their daily interactions with a site. For instance, if someone visits Yahoo! five times in one day, the “frequency” measurement would only count it as one usage day, regardless of whether you’re a first-timer or a regular. Now with the new “visits” metric, we can accurately show how many times that visitor comes back throughout their day - whether just once or multiple times. I think “visits” provides a better snapshot of today’s Web activity and creates a better proof-point for a loyal and engaged audience. To me, this is a true measurement of consumer choice - how many times does a consumer choose to visit that site.

Here’s how it works: As you sip your morning coffee, you scan the headlines of the day, you write a couple emails on Yahoo! Mail, and then do a quick read on your stocks at Yahoo! Finance. 1 visit. After three back-to-back meetings, you remember that your significant other’s birthday is coming up, so you check out the Yahoo! Travel reviews for user recommendations on the most romantic hotel and book your last minute getaway. 2 visits. When you come back from lunch, you check to see if your friend has responded to your email about next week’s party. 3 visits. As you pack up to leave, you go to Yahoo! Local to look up that new sushi bar two cities away, and click Yahoo! Maps for directions to the restaurant. 4 visits.

You get the picture. With “visits,” we get an added layer of data that, combined with reach (the number of users) and engagement (how long they stay), yields a much more comprehensive and meaningful portrait of people’s interactions and activities online. You could even argue that multiple visits a day is more valuable than one long visit, even if the amount of time spent on the site is the same. Why? Because that user is choosing to come back again and again.

This by no means is a silver bullet, as this metric doesn’t count ad consumption and impressions (which, by the way, is also a drawback of page views). What it does provide is a valuable reference for advertisers to determine where to increase their ad exposure and budgets. The more loyal users and “visits” a site has, the more opportunities a particular ad has to be seen. It’s also a key measure of a site’s value and impact to a consumer’s life. There is still more work to be done and we continue to work with our industry counterparts to put in place online measurements that better capture a constantly changing Internet environment.

In closing, big thanks to you for making Yahoo! the most-visited network in January. You stopped by an average of 30 “visits” per month. We’ll make sure to keep coming up with cool products and services, so you’ll keep knocking on our door.

Peter Daboll
Chief of Insights

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6 Comments Add your own

js | March 7th, 2007 at 7:28 pm

To your point, better, but not good. The visits include the scenario where I have two tabs open in Firefox for Yahoo! search and Yahoo! mail and use them constantly all day. Per the description above that would only count as one visit (unless I disconnect), and doesn’t show the “loyalty” factor which is crucial in rating sites and choosing were to put my proverbial buck.

js

Elmer W. Cagape | March 15th, 2007 at 6:11 pm

I wonder why this metric was not given importance in the past. We see this measurement already in place in most, if not all, web analytics tools.

What drove “visits” to more prominence is the inability of page views to track AJAX and Flash web sites that contain multiple pages within a URL.

I have same concerns with js that if I am using tabbed browser and open multiple pages, my visit is counted as one per session, which makes the loyalty measurement a skewed piece of statistics.

Page visits must be used as an addition to existing metrics (esp for the type of sites I described above), not a replacement to page views.

Josh Chasin | March 16th, 2007 at 10:27 pm

Hiya Peter–

When the Internet business community began standardizing definitions (which became constructs) circa ‘96, the alignment around “page view” very much imposed a print construct on the concept of web audience.

I always found this problematic.

Advertising is like physics– its all about time and space. In print, it’s space.

Do you think there is any logic to migrating toward the broadcast construct, which is to say moving from space to time? It is not hard at all to envision a day when the concept of a page is anachronistic, yet the alignment of the industry around that concept makes progress away from the construct seem difficult. Maybe its all about time, not space. In broadcast, or let’s just say any time-based media, audience is calculated based on cume persons, and time spent, and expressed in terms of average minute, average quarter hour, average program, or average daypart persons. No one cares about “frames viewed” (if TV is 24 frames per second and I watch an hour, we all just accept that I watched 60 minutes, and no one cares that I was served 86,400 frames.)

It might be easier to shift adspend from TV (still 50 cents on the dollar here in the US) to the Internet if we gave advertisers the time of day, if you see what I mean.

Remember that TV show from the 60s, Its About TIme? Maybe it is about time.

Time may not be the perfect model. But I’ll leave you with these wise words a guy once told me. “All models are wrong. But some of them are useful.”

Whadaya think?

Cheers.

–josh–

Principal
Warp Speed Marketing, Inc.

Peter Daboll | March 22nd, 2007 at 1:16 pm

Thanks Josh. Scarily enough, I actually do remember the sitcom “It’s About Time.” You bring up some great discussion points and I’d actually like to address them in my next blog post. The short of it is, television “time” is still based on reach at a certain point in time, not the length of time watched. It still boils down to counting the number of eyeballs on the screen. Looking forward to the discussion.”

Rahul Gaitonde | March 26th, 2007 at 10:36 pm

Peter, there are a few flaws in the model you’ve constructed around the “Yahoo! Lifestyle” scenario:

Remember up-front that you (as Yahoo!) are measuring web “effectiveness” to maximise advertising revenue (banner-based or Adwords/Overture based). From that perspective, the “views” model isn’t applicable to anything other than diverse portals like Yahoo!, which aspire to be “one-stop shops” (I’m hearing that too often now - indications of a return to portal-ism?). Second, it doesn’t consider the many many different user interfaces to online information today that aren’t browser-based or even web-page-based. What about Yahoo! Widgets? What about the content access through Yahoo! Messenger? Through Yahoo! Desktop Search? Through Yahoo! Toolbar? Third, what about always-on customisable home pages such as the one Google offers? A user could access content all day long and never have to make more than one “visit”. Similarly, a Gmail inbox could be open all day too, with several dozen ads being served. That would count as one “visit” too. And hell, what about content access from Yahoo! Go?

Clearly, measuring the effectiveness of online content is a lot more hairy than you’ve made it out to be, Peter! :)

mlc | May 16th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

yeah - i think this ‘views’ is a bit simplistic too. there is already a metric called ’sessions’.

me thinks they are trying to make the business metric fit their technical issues.

what the advertiser wants is: how many people are going to see the ad, and for how long. and what’s the quality of the ad position.

selling ‘premium’ ad inventory is about selling three things:
1) the quality of the volume of ads you have to sell
2) the quality of the content the ad will fit into (and its position in this content)
3) the quality of the brand you have

Selling ads is not as simple as refining the one metric.