Update: 07/27/2006 - Dave Morgan, CEO at Tacoda discusses a similar topic in Media Post’s Online Spin today. Dave goes a little further than I do in this post by saying that page views are doomed (anyone remember hearing ‘The Page View is Dead’ bantered around Emetrics?). Dave gives the page view, as we currently know it, two years and then it’s kaput.

What’s Dave’s point? Well, IMHO, in syndication world, if you’re only measuring page views, and more importantly ad impressions (he calls them ad views) at the site level, then you may be missing a big chunk of the picture as that content and its associated advertising are also delivered via a feed. Syndication feeds aren’t the only thing Dave’s worried about, he goes on to discuss video and AJAX as well.
But I like the way Dave sums it all up:

What will this all mean? The demise of the page view means that we will need to focus on other measurements to determine the quantity of content that online media audiences consume. It will focus everyone in our business much more on audience, with the notion of unique audience becoming more important. Engagement–how deeply consumers interact with particular content and with particular ads–will become much more important. The actual results of the ads, whether it be generating leads or sales or requests for information, will become more important.

This will mean changes for the ad serving and ad measurement systems. They will have to anticipate operations and metrics that are much more audience-centric. Life will be much less about how many and much more about who? It will no longer be about the page and entirely about the people. We will probably see the traditional ad-serving companies being displaced by new RSS technology providers like Feedburner, which does for the RSS world what ad-serving companies do for Web pages.

We are at the beginning of a media future where new, consumer-driven technology and metrics will rule. Lots will change. Whether or not you believe that the page view’s death is imminent, it is almost impossible to argue with the fact that in the future, it will be a lot less relevant. Start planning now. Waiting too long may be too late.

Web analytics, already in its short life, is at a cross roads. It’s not a paradigm shift but it is still significant.

As I have spent more & more time in the so-called web 2.0 thanks to this blog, I find that historical web analytics terms and metrics just don’t fit the bill.

For instance, what does a page view mean when the web page is nothing more than a container for some number of content objects that we want to measure? Of course I’m talking about a blog home page which contains N number of posts in it for our reading pleasure. If we follow the strict definition of a page view, we can’t include each on of those content objects - posts - in the page view count lest we raise the harbinger of ‘hits’.

What’s a unique visitor mean when what we care about is circulation and syndication? For my blog, I’m much more interested in the number of readers I have than how many unique cookie-based browser applications have visited my blog.

What’s a download worth when what I really need to know is how many listeners or viewers I have and how many times they have listened or watched my podcast or vlog?

What on earth is a referral in a world where it’s all about knowing who, how many and how often my post/blog/podcast/vlog has been quoted or tracked back to?

As this thing we call the ‘Internet’ or ‘Web’ evolves into a distribution platform from a content channel and destination what are the things that are important to measure and what will they be called? How will they be defined?

The language is evolving and somewhere out here on the fringe the new metrics are starting to take shape. However, traditional web analytics providers are [apparently] having a difficult time adapting to this new language - why?

Standards - a necessary evil
Necessary because they provide a common language for businesses to interoperate with. Evil because, by design, they slow down evolution.

Customers - (yes us)
the ones that spend the most money with them are, in my opinion, most likely to be furthest from the fringe and so new metrics to measure these new things are probably of very little or no value to them (us).

Static Architectures -
Probably designed that way to make their platforms robust (reliable, fast and scalable), their architectures, especially the data structures, are mostly rigid and won’t accept definitions for new/changed metrics from the customer. Some Web analytics vendors have small doorways into the architecture that allow their customers to define a small set of custom labels for a particular event, but behind the scenes it’s still the same old page view or visit and they are not as flexible as the could/should be.

Lack of significant technology change -
It’s still a browser world and because of that the core technologies for data collection (beacons, page tags, logs, etc), have not (cannot be) changed. Once we get used to this ‘Internet’ as a utility for content delivery to any number of applications and platforms, the browser can, if not die a quiet death, then fade into the background and we can focus on measurement where there is no middleman (browser).

Right now, I think that one of the most important steps that web analytics providers can take is to open up their platforms/architectures so that I, as a customer, can define new metrics as-I-go and have them show up where I want, how I want, when I want in the vendor’s various reporting tools.

I’ve seen the edges of this in Future Now’s XML definition for reporting on Persuasion Scenarios (Bryan, Jeff, or John Q - got a link for that somewhere?) which, via XML defines the required reporting elements to the web analytics platform. However, as cool as it is, this still tries to work within the existing data architecture instead of defining the architecture that it needs.

The language is changing, and all the rest that makes up web analytics is goint to change too - will the existing web analytics take the charge on that change or will some new whipper-snapper of a company that’s working out here on the fringe change the game?