Chris Berry went on a tear about page views and how they are the “Hits” of the 1990’s and for the most part I would concur. Page Views are not the most useful metric. And he asks, “What is the value of the metric?” mentioning the rise of JQUERY and Flash it is possible to spend an hour on a site and never leave the first page.
He brings up some valid questions such as “what counts as a successful visit?” and that engagement is much more than mere page views. However, what Chris is forgetting that he is a member of an elite. He is an elite analyst who works with an elite group of programmers. They keep abreast of cutting technologies and are driven either by interest or necessity to push the web development edge.
But are vastly more plain-Jane HTML sites, than JQUERY sites. There are more web pages than there are video streams, and Flash use… let’s just say it’s tiny compared to HTML.
Also “page views” is an easily understandable metric. It’s the training wheels on your analytics bike. It provides stability. For example, I’ve seen streams reporting 200% more plays than there are page views. This says something is not recording correctly. Page views can also be used to indicate where attention needs to be paid.
It also provides context. When someone announces their advertising stream was a roaring success because it got 10,000 plays, I would point out that it also recieved 10 million page views and perhaps is not quite the success they thought it was. That perhaps they should have been shooting for a 1% play rate instead of 0.1%. While Chris is willing to sacrifice understandability for richer, deeper more actionable insights he assumes that everyone in the organization understands the basic building blocks of analytics which simply isn’t true.
Page views is also the easiest metric to implement. Copya piece of JS code. Paste it on the page. Watch the numbers roll in. Implementing and testing in AJAX or Flash can be very time consuming and cumbersome.
While I welcome the day that we can declare the page view a “has-been” metric, the best we can do is gently but firmly guide our clients to understand that there may be more value in other measurements.
Besides, What we really need to deal with is Chris’ hogging of the maple syrup! (inside joke)
What about forgetting page views all together and start tracking things like:
time engaging user?
interactions per minute?
content most requested?
and I’m sure we can easily think of others.