I’ve been thinking about measuring page views in an increasingly widget-heavy and AJAX-y web environment, thanks to Fred’s post from a few days ago. There’s been a lot of posts on how the page view is increasingly inaccurate, if not dead, but many of the posts leave it at that. Pat McCarthy suggests several potential alternatives that already exist; in my spare time I’ve been thinking about new measurements that don’t yet exist.
The best one I’ve come up with to date is probably ‘page share’ – a metric that would take into account the real estate and the prominence of that real estate occupied by any one widget or advertisement, and calculate its ’share’ of any one page. This couldn’t be a straight ‘percentage of page’ measurement – it’d have to be weighted, perhaps through advertising heatmaps (see this one from Google), supplemented by mouse- and click-tracking applications (like, say, Hiten Shah’s Crazy Egg.) So the main content might have a page share of 0.50 while that widget in the right skyscraper position might have a page share of 0.10 and a link in the footer of a page most have to scroll through might have a page share of 0.005. If done right, the share would indicate the tendency of advertising in that position to convert – so an ad unit with a page share of 0.10 would gather twice as many clicks as an ad unit with 0.05. Which would mean you could simplify advertising rate-cards, assigning a single CPM value to the page and just multiplying it by the agreed-upon, standard page share of an ad unit of that size and position to get the ad unit’s CPM. If the page has an overall value of $30.00, then that skyscraper ad unit with a page share of 0.10 would have a $3.00 CPM, simple as that.
Of course, getting people to switch to such a model is harder than proposing it. But everything technically feels largely built. The rendering engine of a browser can read a page’s CSS and HTML and figure out just where elements are positioned on the page. No reason why similar logic can’t be used to determine a piece of screen real estate’s size and position for the calculation of a page share metric.
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Lots of assumptions here… For example, how does one define prominence? You are assuming that things requiring scrolling are less impactful than things on the right or left column. Some studies would agree with this, and others point out that footers are extremely powerful for “followup” messages, esp ones related contextually to the content on the page.
If you allow the “weights” to be derived dynamically via click or mouseovers, then you miss the entire point of many branding ads, who’s impact is not measured via simple view behavior but by changes in mental state causing behavior changes elsewhere.
Instead of mouseovers, you could say that “viewing” is what’s important, and then eyetrack every page format and layout. That’s better, but only the largest of media companies can afford to do this. Remember, the “impact” is what you are trying to work towards, otherwise you would just use % of page space without the weighting.
So, “presence” or “prominence” is too subjective to be a really useful metric as you’ve laid it out, unless you have some empiric studies which show that what combination of position and size (controlling for segment, content on page, and creative of ad) drives the “perception of prominence”.
In my opinion, of course. Its not like I have anything better!
Very interesting thoughts Greg. I think that there are some clear ways to measure some of the things that you mentioned. If a universal “standard” was “invented” for this type of measurement, I can see a lot of people accepting it. I think this year is going to shape up to be an interesting one in regards to advertising, pageviews (or the death of pages views) and analytics / metrics for websites.
You’re on the right track, Greg – and this will be a piece of it. The other piece obviously is integrating time in, and doing so meaningfully… the measurement of advertising and ad effectiveness has hardly moved at all in the last several years online it seems so that is where I’ll be focusing some of my energies… I’ll be blogging more about it in the coming weeks and months as well. But these are very good thoughts you present here.