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

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