This morning I read an article about The Problem with Pagination on CPM Ad Driven Websites over at SEOmoz, and it got me thinking about a problem we have with Analytic on the web at the moment.
The web is driven by advertising, and the advertisers need numbers. The problem we have is the numbers and metrics they use are not keeping up with the technology. Most advertisers rely on three main metrics:
- unique users / browsers (UU/Bs)
- Page Impressions
- Click throughs / PPC
These figures are widely interoperated as:
- How many people have seen my advert
- How many times they have seen my advert
- How many people have
fallen forclicked on my advert
Whilst these are rather inaccurate, they are still a lot better than how other mediums record statistics!
The problem we have is that the last metric (page impressions), is outdated and easily manipulated. It is a problem we encountered with Ceros, because from a page impression point of view, when looking at a Ceros magazine there is only one, "page view", even through a user may be looking at multiple pages of content. The same can be said for watching a video on YouTube, you may be consuming more information (via video) than a standard web page, but it's still only one "page impression".
This is because the metric for page impression refers to an HTML page. The metric is still valid, but the advertisers need a new metric that is more representative of how many times someone saw an advert. Neilson NetRatings tackled the problem last year by moving to a time based metric over page impressions.
Hopefully when this is more widely used the metric for page impressions will be forgotten as the de facto metric for how many times someone saw my advert. I also hope that this will stop techniques highlighted by the SEOmoz article, where a web page is split into multiple pages to boost page impressions. I often see this via Digg, where a top ten something, will be split into ten pages :(
I understand that splitting up an article may boost revenue, but it also ruins the user experience. A simpler way to boost impressions of averts would be to refresh them using AJAX or flash after a period of time. Solving the impressions problem and also maximising the user experience.