New tech puts online ad measures to test

By Anick Jesdanun

updated 5:45 p.m. ET Feb. 9, 2007

NEW YORK - At Yahoo's finance site, stock quotes update automatically and continually, the numbers flashing green and red as prices rise and fall. Wall Street investors can easily leave a single Web page up all day.

Ajax — the software trick used on the page, Yahoo Inc.'s e-mail service and elsewhere — is enabling flashier, more convenient sites. It's also contributing to Yahoo's decline in page views, a yardstick long used for bragging rights and advertising sales.

"These technologies have outgrown the metrics," said Peter Daboll, Yahoo's chief of insights and the former chief executive of comScore Media Metrix, the measurement company that declared Yahoo second to the online hangout MySpace in page views. "It's really important as an industry to come back down to earth and off this chest-thumping about who's biggest."

More important than "truckloads of page views," Daboll said, are visitors' loyalty and their willingness to respond to ads — qualities harder to measure. If a page updates on its own without reloading in its entirety, people may be sticking around longer than the measurements suggest.

Experts say the stubborn attachment to page views also may be keeping some sites from improving their usability.

Jakob Nielsen, a Web design expert with Nielsen Norman Group, notes that many news sites force visitors to click multiple times to read longer stories in sections, even though he would much prefer scrolling down a long story and avoiding interruptions.

AP

"Because you are measuring the wrong things, you are driving your project in the wrong direction," Nielsen said. "You are not maximizing what causes value. You are maximizing the things a computer can count easily."

Many Web sites and advertisers, however, continue to value page views, and MySpace officials say their users continue to return frequently even as the site requires full page reloads for just about everything.

"Over time, page views have been a pretty accurate measure of a site's popularity," said Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer for Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. unit that oversees MySpace. "A page view doesn't necessarily equal an ad opportunity, but (is) an important barometer."

The leading measurement companies aren't about to abandon page views, either, even as they develop supplemental measurements for gauging consumer interaction and loyalty.

"People kind of cling to it, even if they know it's flawed," said Gregory Dale, chief technology officer of comScore. "They want to see this familiar metric."

According to comScore, MySpace managed in just three years to edge out Yahoo as the busiest Web site in the United States by page views. In December, MySpace had 41 billion page views compared with Yahoo's 36 billion, down 2 percent from a year earlier.

Yet Yahoo remains arguably the Internet's leading brand — both in terms of the number of unique monthly visitors and the average time spent, according to comScore. Over the past year, Yahoo's monthly audience grew 3 percent. To throw even more confusion into the mix, rival Nielsen/NetRatings has Yahoo leading in page views as well.

Even before Ajax, techniques for measuring Web audience have come into question.

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