Jul 24, 2007

Web Site Measurement

Page views? Visits per week? Time spent per visit? What's the answer?

Social Degree posits another approach:

A user is much more valuable to a community, to the publisher, and to the advertiser if they are interacting and contributing. 1,000 highly engaged page views is far more valuable than 10,000 non engaged page views to all the stakeholders involved. The best public measurement to date, time spent per page, still falls extremely short of measuring true engagement. In my opinion, the best way to measure engagement is to measure the contribution levels of comments posted, photos posted, blogs posted, (or whatever interaction points are in the community) compared to the number of active users.
As users are now actors, and not just viewers, it makes sense to look at them in terms of what and how they are doing and to what magnitude. And to find new patterns among these behaviors that tells us something more about them in the aggregate.

This is much more interesting than other data sets. And, on the same day that AOL acquires Tacoda, maybe more relevant too.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

True, but there is probably the "silent majority" of users who get real value from a site, but do not necessarily interact with it. If there were a way to extrapolate the figures for "active" users vs. total users and then figure out what percentage of the total user base gained passive value, then you'd be onto something.

Might require Kreskin for that one.