Web Rankings Shakeup: It's About Time

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Measurement companies do not agree on methods or on the most relevant metrics to indicate certain kinds of users' behavior (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/30/07, "The Travails of Tracking Web Traffic"). For example, comScore believes advertisers must consider page views along with time spent, total visits, and a variety of other measurements to accurately judge the relative worth of competing sites.

It's also beginning to factor in new technologies, known as widgets—sharable applications that often promote products or brands and can be placed on users' Web sites. Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore, says the researcher is developing other time-based measurements to be unveiled later this year. "The Internet is always changing fairly rapidly and that is why we tend to take the holistic view of different metrics," he says.

Terms of Engagement

That rapid pace of change is a big reason some metrics are falling out of favor. Page views were once considered a leading indicator of both a site's popularity and, perhaps more important, the amount of advertising space it had to sell.

The reason stems from the way Web sites were designed. Typically, sites could change the content viewed by a user only when the user reloaded a Web page or visited a new one. Advertisers tended to concentrate their dollars on sites with larger page-view counts because it indicated the site's audience was engaged and there was plenty of ad space to sell.

Yet technological advances have erased many of the site-design limitations that made page views a key metric. Using technology such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Web sites can change content or the ads on a page without the user needing to reload the entire page. Web sites can also serve ads through multimedia content resting on the site such as in videos or audio podcasts.

Transition Time

Yahoo argued for judging a site by time spent on it after its adoption of AJAX caused it to generate fewer page views and appear less popular in the rankings. Lynn Bolger, Yahoo's vice-president of advertising and sales insight, applauded Nielsen's move. "I think it is a very, very sound decision," says Bolger. "Time spent is more reflective of what the audience is actually doing and how engaged they are in the content."

Of course, time spent doesn't solve all the problems of page views. Time spent does not serve as a proxy for the amount of advertising inventory a site has to offer. A user on a site for five minutes may see one banner ad, or they may see two streaming video ads and several changing banner ads. No one really knows. That means a marketer can only guess at what site has the most available inventory for it to use to reach its audience. It's probably not feasible for marketers to call up every site they're interested in buying on and ask.

Even Nielsen//NetRatings says it's not sure how long time spent should be the prevailing metric. "Right now it is a transition time and, in that transition time, we are going to say that total time spent is best," says Ross. "As time goes on, other norms will evolve."

Holahan is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.