Is time on site really the best indicator of SEM success

July 13th, 2007

The total time spent on a website by a visitor is the best indicator of the success of online marketing attempts, it has been claimed in the much talked about plans by Neilson/Netratings this week.  This is a significant shift away from the current preferred method of measurement, namely  site visitors.

The change in focus comes in response to innovative website designs which incorporate dynamically updated content on the fly (ie Ajax) , rather than navigating  through a site, as  was the norm in Web1.0.

Director of product marketing for the NetView service Scott Ross was quoted as saying that the new index “ensures fair measurement of websites using rich internet applications and streaming media” as well as highlighting other benefits “also of web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming”.

The rise in use of technologies such as Ajax, has certainly created an issue for Neilsen/Netratings iin terms of effective measurement of site use. As Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim has already highlighted, a number of next generation browsers allow tabbed navigation and as such the validity of such figures could be severely offset by users who keep the page open for extended periods of time, for example I personally have a tab with a Google window open 95% of the time.

However with a lack of suitable alternatives for measurement within many of todays analytics solutions, I can understand to a certain degree the decision, however short sighted in my opinion it may be. Maybe this is more of an issue for the Analytics sector as a whole rather than just Neilsen individually.

Entry Filed under: SEO Industry, News and Views