Back in the day, we talked a lot about “hits” as a measure of a site’s success. Of course, “hits” is a problematic term. What was meant by a “hit” could be up to the individual site owner (images included or not, scale of the site, etc). The industry settled on page views as a good metric. Essentially, let’s only count requests for HTML pages. Then there are visits. Visits are (finally?) coming into vogue as a tracking measurement by the big industry players:
We wanted to get more into engagement and intensity of usage, and help better understand who the audience is,” Jack Flanagan, EVP at comScore Media Metrix, told ClickZ. By measuring the frequency with which a person views content, the metric aims to illustrate a component of user engagement.
Visits will augment the “frequency” metric, which counts the average number of days per month a user visits, and “unique visitors,” which counts the total number of people who visit in a month. Its advantage over “unique visitors” is that it can show more details on user engagement, Flanagan said.
For instance, a visitor that comes to a site once in a month will be counted as one unique visitor, as will a visitor that comes to the site every day that month. With visits, that user can be shown to be a loyal visitor, who visits the site multiple times a day. The visits metric will also be used to calculate “average visits per visitor,” which will show return visits per unique individual during the course of a month.
Source: Can ‘Visits’ Replace Pageviews?
There has always been a bit of a problem with “visits” as a metric. A “visit” is a calculated estimate. See it’s really hard to accurately track people coming to your site. Without getting into the messy details, visits are a real back of the envelope kind of calculation. Good thing for us, however, we’ve pretty much agreed on the “calculation” so we’re good.
I’d like to see an extension of using page views and visits and use page views/visit. This is a really interesting metric it gives you an idea of how interesting your content is. Do people come and leave or hand around and read. Blogs, well, blogs are usually in the 1-2 ish range. Read a post, leave. Now for commerce and informational sites you need to be in the 2-4 range. You need people to be going from page to page.
Okay, okay this is a little geeky. I guess I should be happy that visits are finally getting their due.
As a web + RSS analytics person, a former search engine webmaster, and someone with a joint degree in comp sci/ math + stats, I’d have to say that the metric that is important to you depends on what you need to measure. Didn’t Mark Twain say, “There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Now, I took a “bird” course in university called “The Uses and Abuses of Statistics”. What I learned: use whatever metric works for you.
Visitor counts in and of themselves only give part of the picture. What is their behaviour while visiting? How often do they return? How long do they stay? What pages are they visting. What were they searching for, and did they find it?
Funny thing. Years ago, when I was data mining this kind of information from server logs, most of my bosses would look at my report and have their eyes glaze over. The average person who would use metrics wants it interpreted for them. So I would conclude things like “the pageviews and visits are down because college is out right now, during summer.” That’s more meaningful sometimes.
At times I have actually hit 3 or 4 page views for new traffic. With subscribers you are looking at the 1 to 2 range as they only visit to comment and maybe click through to an old article.
The RSS metrics are hugely important., but what is impossible to determine is the quality of the subscribers.
As an interactive designer who uses flash and ajax with click tagging metrics to record one to one relations between visits and pageviews.
Pageviews are a god indicatr of interest in content - but not a good tracker of individuals who visited the site.
One problem for advertisers is that visits, unlike pageviews, don’t correspond to ad impressions.
But coupling visits with a site’s reach and the length of each stay offers a fuller picture of the site’s audience.
Is there a way to relate them back from an impression served?
Joanna: There is something called a “visitor trail”. Basically, it amounts to tracking the full session for a single IP address within a cluster of pageviews. It’s not entirely accurate if the IP address is shared, but using clustering theory and heuristics, you can get an approximate report of the pages a single visitor visited within a certain time frame and the order in which they did it. Except that you have to pay the price for getting an analytics package that will do this for you.
I used to write my own tracking code and store daily visit behaviour in a database. That was for employers and/or clients. I haven’t bothered with my own websites/ weblogs. The free analytics packages only give you partial results. It really depends on what you want to track for a given site.