Life is grand

It is good to read Nielsen are realising page-views are not an accurate measure of a website. Sadly they have chosen “time-spent” as their new measure.

As a pure value it is a good one to measure but “time-spent” is not a measure of the value or importance of a website. Google Search will suffer on a time-spent metric but Google Search will still be one of the most important websites. Come to think of it all the sites I cannot do without are very good at minimising the amount of time I spend on them. They are tools which let me get in and out as fast as possible. They get the job done. Lingering around, or “stickiness”, is an old way of thinking about the value of a website and Nielsen seem to be catching up with 1999.

Nielsen seem to think sites with the best time-spent metric will help advertisers. I disagree as an effective advertisement has a static amount of time to grab me. An advert becomes less appealing the longer I see it, not more. And the websites that I spend time on, not the gateway tools like Google Search, are the ones I am least likely to click-through on adverts because I am already at my destination. It is the gateway sites where adverts are more effective, the sites I spend the least time on. An advert click-through is a snap-decision.

I’m not sure what should replace page-views but time-spent isn’t it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 8:12 am and is filed under Post, analytics, metrics, nielsen, websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.