Nielsen Introduces New Primary Metric to Reflect Changes in Industry
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Written By Drupad Sil | July 10, 2007 | Share This
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Nielsen/Netratings, a leading online measurement tracking service, is expected to announce today a shift in their primary metric from using page views to rank sites to utilizing total time spent and sessions for all visitors, according to the Associated Press.
Before the announcement, page views were used to determine the relative popularity of different sites. The reasoning was that, the more times users view a site, the more chances advertisers have to interact with them. For June 2007, the top 5 sites in terms of page views were Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, AOL Time Warner, and News Corp. Online, in order. These sites each reach upwards of 86 million unique visitors a month.
However, two new trends in the industry forced Nielsen to change their main way of assessing a site’s popularity ranking. One is the use of Ajax by Yahoo and others, which automatically and continually updates sites. Because Ajax requires users to pull pages less frequently, it produces lower page views statistics. Similarly, online video at sites like YouTube, though enormously popular, show less overall page views.
By implementing their new metric, Neilson ratings will change significantly. In June 2007, for example, AOL becomes the most “popular” site, with an average of 3 hours, 22 minutes per person, mostly thanks to its instant messaging service. Time Warner is a distant second, with Yahoo right behind. Microsoft and eBay round out the top five, with Google falling to sixth. Overall, AOL users logged 25 billion minutes, just ahead of Yahoo’s 20 billion minutes, and Google fell to fifth. In contrast, page view measurements for the same time period show Google in third place and AOL in sixth.
For advertisers, the distinction in these rankings is important. As the AP report illustrates,
“Yahoo has more than twice the time spent as Fox, but has less than a 10 percent edge in page views. That is because MySpace requires users to pull up a new page anytime they make a change or view a new profile, while Yahoo increasingly uses Ajax to continually pull new data, even if a user stays on the same page all day.”
Nielsen’s rival, comScore, has also introduced a similar metric to illustrate this difference. Unfortunately, neither page views nor unique visitors nor time spent on site are (by themselves) effective ways of measuring visability to advertisers. Regardless, the introduction of a more appropriate popularity metric within Neilson’s primary ranking should persuade site owners and advertisers alike to reconsider their measurement goals.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Search: News, Web Analytics |
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