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

When banner ads started cropping up on the Internet in the mid-’90s, the term “hit” was all the rage. A “hit” (as in, a hit to a server) was the reigning measurement of a site’s popularity. Hits attempted to show how many times a page was viewed by a user. As the online measurement industry evolved and site designs grew more complex, “hits” fell out of favor because they included all server calls, even those where users ditched a page before it fully loaded. Counts were therefore inflated.

It also became apparent that some independence was necessary to have believable performance numbers. Over time, engagement with a site evolved to measuring “page views,” which were typically collected from independent, third-party sources. When combined with the “unique visitor” count, page views (or PVs) provided a metric of who saw the site and how much content or how many ads they consumed.

Enter the first measurement dilemma: There was no industry standard for how a page view was measured. Different firms used different methodologies, which differed still from how sites’ internal logs were measuring traffic. No one was right or wrong, just different. Do you count PVs from outside the country? From spiders and bots? Do you count when the page is requested, or when the page is fully loaded? Although the industry has radically improved standardization in recent years, many questions remain about the efficacy of the page view as a method for tracking engagement or impressions.

Before I joined Yahoo!, I was President and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, where we spent years grappling with the challenges of measuring a dynamic web environment. It’s 10,000 times more complicated than measuring television, and it’s only gotten more complicated in the last year or so, with the adoption of cool technologies like Ajax and Flash and the growth in video. They’ve changed the way Yahoo! and other companies are designing products for consumers, but they will also translate into page view declines.

When you view our new Yahoo! Maps, for example, Ajax allows you to drag the maps around and zoom in and out without having to wait for the page to reload. But for all that convenience, the new experience translates into just one page view. Our users tell us they much prefer the new maps to those of old, so suddenly counting page views seems far less important.

Yahoo! has long reigned in page views. But we knew we’d eventually cede this honor as we incorporated more consumer-friendly technologies into our products. And that’s OK with us, if it means our services will be better built for how people want to use the Internet today vs. in 1998.

Page view counting has been a key measure for a decade but just because it was once the obvious solution, doesn’t mean it’s the best one now. A couple of reasons why:

• PVs aren’t a good reflection of web activity in 2006 and beyond. It’s a broadband world and page views are irrelevant to some of the most frequently used Internet services like instant messenger, VoIP, or video, in addition to technologies such as Flash and Ajax. More page views might actually reward sites for poor site design in light of these new technologies.
• PVs have never been consistently measured by third parties or by sites themselves. Everyone has a different definition of when and how a page is counted.
• PVs don’t represent ad inventory. In the early days of the Internet, page views were used to represent available ad impressions, but the reality is that page views and ad impressions are actually counted in different ways and don’t correlate. PVs also have little to do with available inventory with the different types of ad units available today using text, audio, video, etc.

The bottom line is that the page view has outgrown its usefulness. The industry needs to embrace change and develop new metrics that measure this new world more accurately. We all need to help to wean the industry off the crutch of familiar metrics in favor of more accurate and representative ones. We all need to be smart about these new metrics — the measurement companies, major publishers, and advertisers.

I remember a quote by Albert Einstein, who said something along the lines of: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” We can’t oversimplify complex web measurement. We need more innovative ideas and execution to measure new technologies and incorporate user behavior into measurement standards.

At Yahoo!, we’re working closely with the measurement firms and our internal analytics teams to ensure we’re creating the most accurate representation of user activity on our sites. Nobody has all the answers, so we need everyone pushing.

Peter Daboll
Chief of Insights