Steve Rubel is asking What Will Replace the Almighty Page View? but I am not quite convinced by his candidate, “Events”.
These days most interactive web sites are built using Flash and/or Ajax (a cake mix of Javascript, XML and HTML). Page views are useless here. They only count complete refreshes of a page. Yahoo’s page views fell late last year as it increasingly turned to these technologies to power popular products like Yahoo Maps. Enter “events.” Sophisticated web measurement tools, such as Google Analytics, can track every single interaction an individual makes within a page – including Flash and Ajax.
This is good, we are getting somewhere. Some challenges to this as a key metric though.
- Who decides which events count?
- How do you decide which events count?
- Are more events better? A better made UI might require fewer events …
- Is reading one post one event? Even if it is over multiple pages? Reward a metric and people cheat that metric …
- If I pull some content by clicking, dragging and filtering, how many events is that? I pulled up a piece of content (one event) but had to go through several (possibly tedious) interactions ..
My personal favourites are still Conversions (where the money is), Active Registered Users and if that is not possible, Unique Visitors. Despite the problems of how do you define “active” and the cookie problem with Uniques, they still hold the most telling health check of a web property in my view.
Tags: web2.0, metrics, tracking, stats, conversion, measurement, micropersuasion