Nielsen Tracking No More

What are the standards of analyzing traffic on your website? Don’t ask the traffic giant Nielsen/NetRatings. They just announced plans to drop the longtime measurement of page views and instead focus on the amount of time a user stays on the website. The issue apparently has to deal with the growing inconsistency of measuring what constitutes a page view.

With companies like Yahoo using technology that pulls and generates information on the same page without pulling an additional one, this can often be misleading on how many pages are viewed. Using programming like AJAX can result in only 1 page view being viewed, instead of like 2,3,4 or more.

Interestingly, according to the article published by AP, it seems that Nielsen’s rival, comScore Media Metrix has developed another way to combat AJAX and overcome the issues that Nielsen has encountered:

Nielsen’s rival, comScore Media Metrix, also has addressed the rise of Ajax with the development of site “visits” – defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour.