The UK’s best-known website auditing firm, ABCe, will move to measuring unique users instead of page impressions as its mandatory measurement metric. Page impressions have come under fire as a metric for several reasons, not least the ability to fake results by splitting a story over several pages.
This is good news for professional blogs: Because blogs tend to have their most recent stories all on one page, page impressions per user tend to be low. You have a look at the new stuff and move on. A measurement that is based on the number of readers they have will better reflect their popularity. This should allow popular blogs to compete more easily for mainstream advertising, which has often been sold on a cost-per-thousand impressions basis in the past.
It’s good news for Web 2.0 sites too: A lot of Web 2.0 sites use dynamic pages, as you know. Instead of reloading the page, new information comes streaming in via an XMLHttpRequest instruction. Think about something like Writely, now called Google Docs. You might use it for three hours and never reload the page. If that was your business, and you sold advertising to support it, then you wouldn’t be too happy about being judged on page impressions.
4 Comments
Impressions is bad. But unique users depends on cookies and a lot of users have their internet browsers set yuo to delete cookies or not even accept them.
Out of the frying pan into the fire!
Yes, that’s true. But how many ‘normal’ people ever even think or know about cookies? As a mass media measurement, I reckon it works better.
But, why “unique” users? Why not all users?
Take the television industry, for instance. For a given popular show, how many viewers are unique and how many are return viewers? In terms of advertising, more than not, they are looking at the total number. I would say that the makers of shows would be very interested in new viewers, just to know their shows are fresh.
The same can be said for websites and their advertisers.
I really question this concept of only “unique” users.
I guess, Bob, because unique visitors makes it easier to eliminate fraud. *I*, for example, shouldn’t count as a visitor at all, and certainly not more than once.
New visitors is an interesting idea, though, from an advertising perspective. If I had a sponsor, then that might be more important than regulars who have already seen the ad and either ignored or acted on it.