Last month, comScore changed from measuring page views to their new “visits” metric, designed to better measure visitor engagement. Or, as they put it, “visits” measures “the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes, is a way of measuring the frequency with which a person views content, thereby illustrating a key component of user engagement.”
Nielsen//NetRatings is not one to be left behind. The The Wall Street Journal (sub req) reports on NTRT’s new metric: “Nielsen/NetRatings, in June will release what it calls ‘time-spent’ data and stop issuing its rankings by page views.”
Bryan Eisenberg asks the obvious questions:
- Do you ever open up a browser and get distracted by a phone call, a meeting, your kids, or an instant message? Will the time the “page” is open be counted there as well?
- Have these folks never heard of tabbed browsing? Stop reading for a moment. How many tabs or browsers do you have open at the moment. More than one, most likely. People keep 6 or 7 tabs opened and would all of them count as time spent from the moment that tab was opened? That’s a clear indication that someone is engaged, huh?
And here’s one more obvious question: what do they mean by “time-spent” data? I mean, seriously, they can’t really just be measuring the amount of time a page is open on a browser window… right?
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