Nielsen/NetRatings Focuses on Total Minutes - Flaws and Concerns
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Reactions in the industry to Nielsen/NetRating’s move have been mixed. While most agree with the idea that page views are becoming outdated as a metric of a web site’s popularity, some think the change may be a little premature. Sheryl Draizen, general manager of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, thinks caution is warranted because “I don’t think we’ve done enough work to come up with what is the replacement for the page view…It may be that time spent is the right one, but I don’t know if we know that yet.”
The difference you need to keep in mind is that, while time spent can measure engagement with a web site, so can page views. Page views specifically measure user-initiated actions (clicks on a page). If you’re measuring the time someone spends on a site, how do you know they haven’t just left the site open while they go to the restroom, do chores, leave to run some errands, or do any of a number of things that don’t translate to site involvement? Could it be that minutes spent on a website don’t translate as smoothly into engaged users as some would like us to believe?
The problem multiplies when you consider the effects of increasing broadband access, tabbed browsing, small desktop applications such as instant messengers and stock ticker feeds, and larger high-resolution monitors. As a result, it’s easy to have lots of different web pages and applications all open on your computer at the same time. As a writer, I’ve done that any number of times while researching an article, and I know plenty of people who multitask more than I do. Is it really valid to count all of that?
In the end, it may not truly matter that much. Marketers must decide for themselves if a particular site is a good advertising investment, and the total minutes spent at the site ranks as simply one piece of information. No one is going to stop advertising with Google because its standing with Nielsen/NetRatings has slipped; the search engine clearly knows how to bring in money for itself and its advertisers. As the landscape changes and becomes more complicated, perhaps we’ll all benefit from realizing how important it is to use more than one metric, and – even in an industry that reinvents itself all the time – to take a quick look at historical performances before letting any one piece of information draw us up short.
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