Pageviews as a tool for statistics on the Web 2.0: game over?
How are evolving statistics on the Web 2.0?
You can still speak exclusively of pageviews as the primary tool to indicate the traffic of a site?
Rashmi Sinha takes over an article of Computerworld.com and wondering how they affected, in recent years, applications belonging to the so-called Web 2.0 (about the Web 2.0, in this article I wrote about how you can even create a Web operating system 2.0 only, proof of how many innovations have been brought under 2.0)…
Take for example a Slideshow, in Flash o in Ajax: photographs or slides will be browsed by clicking on the buttons NEXT and BACK to, that are not going to open a new page with the new photo / slide, but go to load the SINGLE FILE (p.es. jpg) that will be shown on the same page when it was displayed the previous photo.
It appears evident that in this way, any code that performs the tracking of visiste, will not detect the loading of the new page, and then statistics will be altered.
To explain more clearly, if the user sees 10 photos / slides, in statistics will not be counted 10 page, but only a, in which they were loaded all the photos from time to time.
This goes to alter the statistics that indicate the activity of a site… 1 and 10 are not the same thing!
This I also experienced I, with My Gallery, where clicking on a photo, you can start a slideshow, and click two buttons to go back and forth. Neither the hit counter photos, nor that of site statistics, and aggiorneranno, Unfortunately.
Same situation is for sites with many video content, like those of Youtube, where you can for example spend 20 minute display of video on one page, without the pageviews are increased.
The company Nielsen / NetRatings, about a year, preferred to use the time spent on the site by each user as the main parameter, abandoning pageviews, and were found actually improvements.
Others have considered other body parameters, as the number of clicks per visit, or, style Web 2.0, activity “Social” carried out, how to leave comments, vote, tag and so on.
As many marketing companies still use the number of page views as the main tool for evaluating a site, I will likely, in the near future, that there will be a transition to systems a little more advanced than the number of pages visited, what you think?