Neilsen/Net Ratings Says Time Spent Is Important, Not Page Views

Associated Press reports that Nielsen/Net Ratings will scrap measurements based on the long-time industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend on a site. Neilsen says time spent is a measure of engagement with a site.

Wait a minute! Right now, I have seven tabs open in Firefox, and since I get interrupted by phone calls, email, dog walking, the need to write, IMs, Skype, and bouts of thinking, some of those sites might stay open for hours. That doesn't mean I'm engaged with the site. And I bet you work the same way.

I do not know the perfect way to measure traffic, but I am sure that time spent isn't it. Several people have come up with formulas for measuring blog influence, taking into account Alexa rankings, Google results, links from other blogs, and so on. It seems to me that a more complex formula is what Nielsen needs.

Aside: just this morning, a potential client asked me how many hits my site gets, indicating that many businesses have a long way to go in understanding site traffic.

Any suggestions for what would be more realistic?

I know that this is hard to do for sites that aren't e-commerce sites, but tracking sales is what does the trick for me.

How about self assessment based scoring? With credibility checks through wisdom of crowd?

I attended a recent webinar given by Nielsen/NetRatings on this topic and they addressed the issue of multiple tabs and interruptions by saying that they only credit "in focus" time.

I guess that somehow with their panels they are able to know whether you are working in Word, reading email, or actually engaging with a website.

However, they also know they've got to sell this new metric to publishers and advertisers alike, but if their measurement tool is propietary and more sophisticated than just being time-based, they're going to have to sell that as well.

Kim - the metrics will need to change again and again because the web is in flux.

many people now believe the future of the web is in mobile, in phones in particular, and that'll make websites even less relevant than they are now.

Every web site, hell even PAGE has different metrics to measure what is success. In line with the above comment on sales, if the goal is to increase sales then page views don't mean a thing, and time spent on the site doesn't really reveal anything either - the user may take a week between the time they see an item on your site, price shop it, look for alternatives and finally return a week later to buy it.

Also, if you're sending invites to a select group of people and the goal is to get them to register for the conference/event, why would amount of time or page views matter? Ultimately it's about conversions.

It's too simplistic for anyone, including Steve and Neilsen, to say that one metric matters and another doesn't. The goal is what determines success - and YES, it could be the number of page views.

This is always an interesting topic with clients.

There is another train of thought that if you are trying to get to the real 'do-ers' then should we be trying to get to a model of engagement/contribution and interaction model?

Based on the time metric, a client may ask "so what if a consumer has spent 10mins on my site - they haven't done anything!"

The debate continues