Web metrics for Web 2.0 - What are you measuring?
John Battelle predicts, this is the year to re-define our web metrics. The traditional methods of looking at hits and page views are just not good enough when it comes to video, Ajax, blogs, RSS and the numerous applications that have surpassed the humble static web page.
With the majority of Bandwidth taken up by Video, time spent on a site may provide a better metric, than page views, but, even this starts to fall apart when you look at shared content. If I was to reference a YouTube video on my blog, and someone was to watch it here, my analytics would report a long session, and so would You Tube’s - and the external monitoring services like Hitwise would find it difficult to make sense of any of it - may be they would show my site in the up and down stream to YouTube
In November 2006 Media Metrix reported that MySpace had a higher share of page views than Yahoo! But according to Yahoo! this was entirely down to the introduction of Ajax, which reduces the number of traditional page loads, but maintained the time people spent on the site. Ajax enables a portion of a page to be refreshed without loading an entirely new URL, which is the thing measured by nearly all analytics tools.
My RSS reader lets me read all my favourite blogs without ever going to the site. Is measuring the number of subscribers on Feedburner enough?
What about the number of people that comment on a blog, or link to it, doesn’t this show how successful you’re at being connected?
The technical challenges to evolving new metrics is probably not as difficult as creating a standards that everyone can follow and trust. Whether we use time to measure interaction, or tag events in Ajax and other applications, measure the number of comments or reviews and even links and search engine rankings, there’s much to be agreed and resolved.
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