A comment is made in the online article that perhaps web analytics needs to catch up to the emerging technologies. Another comment is made basically stating that pageviews really don't mean much except to media companies who use that metric to generate equity.
For the record, NextStage does have a PageView metric. Like most everything else NextStage does, it's not what the industry considers a pageview, but more of that later.
I've written about the need for better metrics and more defensible, broader analytics in Matching Marketing and IT Mythologies, Rethinking Your Best Practices and Usability Studies 101: Real Tracking, among other places. The advent of new technologies creating new paradigms and requiring new methods of measurement has rich historical precedent. Broadband, RIA and their progeny can be measured by existing tools. I can also empty the ocean with an 8oz measuring cup, it'll just take me a long time and the results will be meaningless long before I'm done.
More of that later dept: NextStage's concept of a pageview has to do with knowing for a fact that the page was actually viewed by a human and not some other technological artifact. This also includes knowing when some technological artifact cached a page that was later viewed by a human. There are several simple ways to do this, many of them explained in our research papers.
After all, isn't a human what you really want viewing your page?
» Standards and Noisy Data, Part 2 from BizMediaScience
Are we measuring acts or the reason for the act? [Read More]
Tracked on: January 11, 2007 8:20 AM | Permalink to Trackback