ComScore Introduces New Engagement Metric
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | March 15, 2007 | Share This
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Today ComScore introduced a new metric to help measure user engagement with a site: “The “visits” metric, defined as the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes, is a way of measuring the frequency with which a person views content.” “Visits” will be broken down into total visits, average minutes per visit, average visits per visitor, and average visits per usage day.
Comscore provides some comparison charts to show how the measurement of visits alongside page views can dramatically change a site’s traffic stats. Facebook, for example, has the second highest “visits per visitor” ranking, with 23.6 average visits per visitor during a given month. Yahoo, Microsoft, Time Warner, and Weatherbug are other sites that rank highly for visits per visitor - all of which are above Google.
For brand advertisers, Comscore indicated that visitation can often be directly correlated with offline events - Visitation to entertainment-news site, for example, spiked around the academy awards. As Yodel Anecdotal’s Peter Daboll writes,
“[The Visits metric] provides 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.”
Though visits may not replace page views, they provide a richer picture of a site’s worth.
Topics: Technology, Web Analytics |