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.

Reading through what SpotPlex, a “better Digg”, is I was once again reminded that we need shared website statistics.

Putting yet another bit of JavaScript into your site is not the answer. I already have Google Analytics plus a few widgets and it slows my pages down. If Spotplex were to have a bad day and I had their JavaScript I may get errors and long waits as URI requests timeout. Plus it is one more vector of attack into my website.

We can go two ways on this sharing idea. Each website can expose a statistics API that allows callers to request certain statistical data or we can setup a central hub that receives stats and shares them out to parties you allow. The central hub can use a stats standard and be open for anyone to run and federate.

The recent Second Life database breach makes me wonder if websites will want to continue capturing as much info as they can on registration and usage. The practice has been to capture info that is not immediatley useful to the website. Register for Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail etc. and you will be asked many questions that have nothing to do with sending and receiving email. The belief was that all this user info could be of future value.

Now though it may be advantageous to capture less info. Capture just the info you need to use the service and nothing more. That way a breach does less damage.

evhead makes some good points about how pageviews are going the way of hits in the grand game of website analytics:

Pageviews were never a great measure of popularity…

So what’s a better measurement? Good question. Like many good questions, the answer is “it depends.” If you’re talking about what’s important to pay attention to on your own site, you have to determine what your primary success criteria are and measure that as best you can. For some sites, that could be subscribers, or paying users, or revenue, or widgets deployed, or files uploaded, or what have you. It may even be pageviews.

At Blogger, we determined that our most critical metric was number of posts. An increase in posts meant that people were not just creating blogs, but updating them, and more posts would drive more readership, which would drive more users, which would drive more posts.

Essentially it depends on your site and your intentions. A search site has very different measures of success to a site such as MySpace or Flickr or a web-app like Megite.

evhead goes on to say that someone should tackle the tough job of providing a single metric culled from various data. I doubt one metric can be found and doubt it is even worth it. The measure of success between different vertical markets is too great for one metric to be anything more than vainglory. It is largely worthless knowing that MySpace is on the march to beating Yahoo! in pageviews/traffic/something. Two different sites.

Looking above you can see my latest Google Analytics report. It is pretty and has some interesting data points but the interest is the same as a funny video on YouTube. Interesting but useless.

Google Anlytics isn’t useless. For many sites it is a power tool but in my case and the case of many personal bloggers it is pretty pictures and nothing more. My measure of success is connections with readers. Readers who email me, readers who comment and readers who mention my posts in theirs. Not pageviews or sources, not search keywords or length of time spent.

A metric per vertical market would be useful, for advertisers and investors and even us users, but one, grand, over-engineered metric isn’t worth our time.

Until the day that Windows, Mac and Linux have an attention trust recorder running as a default service on boot we are going to have to get websites to emit attention data.

Everytime I do a Google search let Google send my search and whatever result I choose to my attention data store. Everytime I view a photo on Flickr, let Flickr send that URL to my attention store. When I Gmail, let Gmail send. When I del.icio.us, when I WordPress and when I TechCrunch; send.

Reverse website analytics in a way. The hit counter emits to your attention store “Thanks for visiting.”