Nielsen/NetRatings has changed the way they rank and rate web sites. They announced that they will now be ranking websites based on how long users spend on the site and not by just how many page views a web site has. Using this new ranking system, AOL has propelled over and past rival Google to achieve the number one position.

“This new measure will report the total time spent for all visitors and provide a better understanding of users’ total engagement of Web pages and volume of traffic” Nielsen said.

This is great news as many of us in this industry have believed for quite a long time, that a web site’s effectiveness needs to be looked at on a much lower and more detailed level than just page views. Even more importantly, these new measurements could have an effect on how online advertising is priced and sold. Very soon web sites are going to be held to a higher standard than just a plain old CPM rate.

Another reason that I believe this sort of metrics will become standard in the very new future is because of the new technologies that are coming out. Ajax is an example that automatically refreshes content without having users refresh a page. Using page views as a success metric is already obsolete, in the near future, more people will start understanding that.

Technorati Tags: Nielsen/NetRatings, AOL, Google, page views, CPM

I was listening to a WebEx on a fairly broad subject, how to drive quality traffic to a web site.  During a Q&A period, someone asked about a specific site they were talking about and what was their metrics and analytics strategy?  One of the people on the panel responded with something like, “Our goal was to drive traffic to the site first and then we were going to worry about measuring the traffic later.”  At first, this statement made me cringe in my chair.  I thought, how do you quantify whether the traffic you are receiving is delivering you the ROI you are looking for?  Moreover, how do you disseminate where your traffic is coming from to allow you to see what is working and what is not?

Though then I began to think that maybe this goes back to that age old question of what came first, the chicken or the egg?  It seems like a similar quandary as without traffic there is really nothing to measure, but without measuring, you really do not have any idea about the who, what and when’s of your traffic.

I think that a couple of years ago, the argument of focusing on traffic first and metrics later was a much more valid argument than it is today.  For the simple reason, technology has advanced so far that enabling metrics is very cheap, if not free, and very easy to integrate within a web site.  It seems to me that launching any kind of an online marketing initiative without enabling the most basic of analytics systems is unwise and foolish.

If you want to know more about analytics and just how that among many other factors can translate into real strategy, I recommend checking out JP Sherman’s Blog.

Technorati Tags: metrics, analytics strategy, online marketing