Page views are now obsolete

By paul.fabretti / July 13, 2007 / Internet / 2 Comments

Steve Rubel reports that the page view is now dead. With the increased use of Ajax, updating only the dynamic content, page refreshes (and therefore their views) are no longer relevant.

Nielson are now measuring visit duration instead, but how does this address the matter of tabbed browsing? As soon as a new tab is opened, metrics start measuring the amount of time a user is on the website.

But, imagine (as I do) you open IE7 or Firefox with 3 tabs (Google Reader, BBC News and Facebook for example) the clock will start running even though on ALL 3 tabs at the same time, even though only one is "live".

With IE7 now bringing tabbed browsing to the mainstream how can metrics address this apparent shortfall in accuracy?

Maybe it already does, so if someone knows how this is being treated, please let me know!

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  • http://blog.bibrik.com Rachel Clarke

    They’ll all be treated as a single session per site, which usually has a max of 30 minutes. So if you open them everytime you open the browser, each site will record a max session for one user.

  • http://blendingthemix.com paul.fabretti

    So each open tab, even unused, will “reset” after 30 minutes – but will be recorded to only the one user?

    I wonder if it would be possible to integrate a “this tab is now live” piece of code, with which the metrics could then set the clock running?

    Pie in the sky?