23 Musings

Hat tip to Josh at Read Write Web for his write up regarding this link that I'd never come across before. It's a demo of an analytics tool aimed at web 2.0 and AJAX websites.

With the death of the page view as the all important metric of the analyst there has appeared a need to be able to measure users engagement with a website rather than just how many pages they viewed.

The rise of AJAX has been a major player in this with whole websites sometimes being a single screen which makes many calls to databases and servers in order to refresh itself multiple times in a users visit. Thus devaluing the page view completely.

The demo shows a novel way to gauge a users engagement by measuring in time how long segments of the page stay in the browser viewing pane. This isn't perfect by a long way but it's a sign of how analytics tools will have to work in the future as websites get more difficult to measure and marketeers and management get more demanding in their hunt for data to help understand their users.

Also really interesting is the demo of a tool to measure users engagement with a banner advert. I can't wait till metrics like this exist as they may help marketers see that throwing money into display advertising is not the way forward anymore.

What I'd really like to see is mouse interaction data on pages as well. It surely is possible to collect the data on the X and Y coordinates and it's a good hint as to what area of the screen a user is actually focused on (users tend to hover the mouse over what interests them). It's great to know that the item you're interested in is within view but how do you know that users are actually looking at it? Short of installing eyetracking as defacto in PC's we may never answer questions like that!

Compete.com have released some stats listing the top 50 website domains by unique visitors on their blog today. It makes for some interesting reading:
Yahoo is still the biggest domain in terms of unique users. Not surprising given their huge coverage, surely they have to come up with a way to make a success of all these eyeballs? They may lose out in search to Google but with such a vast web real estate finding a way to leverage that is key for them. Google however coming second is amazing considering their core is still search!

Facebook at number 21 is a bit of a surprise, I'd assumed they'd be higher given the buzz but perhaps they'll position much higher next year (if their bubble doesn't burst).

The growth figures in the blog post are most intersting, showing sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Digg as some of the biggest gainers (bigger even than Facebook). This certainly is the time of sharing content, something Facebook has yet to get right (they started off well but it's lately disolved into MySpace'esque profile vanity).

Adult dating still a major growth area it would seem; the person who launches a Facebook for this domain will win big!

Of the losers, most intersting for me is the losses experienced by Expedia. This can only be down to the emergence of much better sites that give users more intuitive ways to search for flight & hotel availability. Online travel is much more competitive in that arena this year and with the move from tour operators to embrace dynamic packaging I can only see Expedia losing more eyeballs if they don't make some significant functionality changes soon.

Neilsen/NetRatings has announced it will lower it's weighting given to rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at websites. It has added both 'Total Minutes' and 'Total Sessions' metrics to NetView, its syndicated Internet audience measurement service.

This is to counter the problems their measurements encouter with rich applications using AJAX etc which allow users to interact with websites and services without reloading pages.

This has been coming for a while and I look forward to seeing the shake up in the rankings based on their metrics. I can think of a few sites that should benefit (due to users interacting with single pages for some time) and I can also think of a few sites that should suffer (due to users clicking around blindly and then leaving).

Nielsen Ratings is soon to release it's new metrics for websites. This is in response to the concern over using just pageviews (which has been the metric of choice for advertisers up to now). With developments such as AJAX, pageviews are not as relevant as they once were.

'Total' web statistics will include measures such as the total number of minutes users spend on a site, pageviews and more.

I'm hoping this will also include interaction with web pages as that is the only true way (that I can think of) to measure the usage of AJAX applications where the screen refreshes without loading a new page.