In all of the fuss about NetRatings dropping page views as a metric used to calculate site popularity is the fact that the company actually did a pretty smart thing: they took my advice from February 15th of this year and rolled in a very valuable and useful “sessions” metric. Well, maybe it wasn’t my advice they took, but I think it was a great idea either way to drop page views since they’ve become increasingly inconsistent to instead focus on the one metric that is consistently applied and well defined, sessions.

Unfortunately NetRatings chose to focus their announcement on “total minutes” saying that time was a better measure of engagement. Personally I’ve never been a very big fan of the time spent metrics — I guess I’ve just looked too long and too hard at all the problems associated with how time is collected and recorded in the web analytics realm.

There is a really engaged thread at the Web Analytics Forum at Yahoo! Groups on this subject that is definitely worth a read if you’re interested.

And I’ll admit, I don’t have all the details associated with how panel-based services like Neilsen and comScore track time spent. If they’re actively tracking the user and only counting time when the browser window is active and the mouse is moving, well that would be a good use of the panel. My suspicion is that, like in web analytics, they’re simply recording the delta between the first and last request for a page in the domain — a strategy that suffers from a litany of well-described problems.

The two I see as most problematic are:

• Single page visits are either difficult to count or not counted in time spent calculations
• The amount of time a web page is open is likely only poorly correlated to their actual engagement with the page

Some have already noted that the fact that very popular sites like Google will do poorly in time spent on site because one of the dominant use cases involves only a single page (I search and I go.) Conversely, depending on how time spent on site is calculated, the search engines may have inordinately long times spent based on a search leading to a long browse time on a discovered site, leading back to the search results (same session, clock is presumably still ticking), leading to the next discovered site, etc.

I for one use iGoogle in exactly this way: I load the page frequently throughout the day and do nothing more than look at a single page view. In fact, unless Nielsen is either tracking the AJAX-interaction with the iGoogle interface, or counting single page view sessions, it is likely that my interaction with iGoogle is not counted at all. But let me assure you, I am quite engaged with the content in my Google portal (something that would be well evidenced by the total session count I generate at the site each day.)

As I looked back through the plethora of comments that my original post on using sessions to compare sites I noticed that I had made this statement in response to a comment from Jacques Warren:

• If you want to compare two or more web sites, use sessions because of the reasons I outlined in my original post.
• If you’re interested in the number of people coming to one web site (presumably yours), use de-duplicated unique visitors but be mindful of cookie deletion.
• If you’re interested in the activity of people on your web site, and if you have a “Web 1.0″ web site, use page views but be mindful of issues like code coverage, proxies, robots, etc.
• If you’re interested in the activity of people on your web site, and if you have a “Web 2.0″ web site built around RIAs, etc., use some form of event model.

I’ll stand by this. Until I know more about how N/NR and comScore calculate their time spent on site metrics it’s hard to believe their numbers to be any more useful or accurate than those provided by direct measurement systems. That said, I’d welcome a briefing on the subject from either company if they’re reading this and are interested in having me pick apart their methodology spending some time with me.

If companies really need to use time spent on site, they should consider using better key performance indicators for time such as Percent Low/Medium/High Time Spent on Site categories (something I talk about at length in The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators.)  That way N/NR could report on the percent of all tracked sessions that were “30 seconds or less”, “31 seconds to 5 minutes”, and “More than 5 minutes” (as an example) which would give us a more powerful view into the relationship between visitors and the time they spend on site.
At the end of the day I like that N/NR has provided a consistent and easily compared metric to their customers in “total sessions” which is what I will inevitably focus on as a measure of site popularity. Having devoted quite a bit of time to describing what I believe to be a solid measure of visitor engagement, it’s difficult for me to think about “time spent on site” (or even “total sessions”) as a good proxy. Time spent, recency, depth of session, session number, etc. are all components of engagement, not direct measures.

What do you think? Is Nielsen right and I’m crazy? Have you been looking closely at your time spent on site metric for years and are delighted that the rest of the world has finally caught up? Or are you like me and spend far too much time browsing from site to site, flipping from task to task, and thusly confounding clocks and counters on every site you visit?

I welcome your comments.

I had a chance to catch up with my friend So Young Park last week. I first met So Young when she worked at A&E Television and I was at JupiterResearch. She was an excellent resource and a great champion for Omniture’s technology. Now she’s the Director of Ecommerce Marketing and CRM at MusiciansFriend.com in Ashland, Oregon, and she’s looking for someone with a passion for both music and web analytics to help round out her team.

You may know So Young from when she was quoted in the Wall Street Journal talking about how her blog helps her recruit people to work at MF. Blogs are a great thing.

Anyway, SYP needs a talented individual to help support 13 company brands, first and foremost Musician’s Friend. They have a just-completed Omniture installation and need a bright person to support widely distributed SiteCatalyst reporting. SYP has a classic “hub and spoke” deployment model but needs deep web analytics expertise in the hub (she has database marketers, stats gurus, search folks, etc. already and this hire will be working with that team.)

The company is working with Offermatica and has been testing extensively which is a good thing. But they need someone with rich analysis skills to help guide the testing work, especially as they start to focus on landing page testing.

This would be a high-profile role inside a quickly growing organization. Musician’s Friend is the 800 lb gorilla in the musical instrument vertical online but they’re always looking to grow and improve. This hire would work in a cross-functional role supporting multiple brands and has the potential to become a key role in the company’s geographic expansion.

The job is in beautiful Ashland, Oregon and SYP says the company is willing to cover relocation expenses. The salary is competitive for the region but the biggest perk is simply working in the MF environment. Big discounts on gear, plenty of musicians in the company, jam nights, and a laid back atmosphere make me wish I could turn back the hands of time to when I was drumming with the mighty Sugar Beets (yeah, I used to be cool, believe it or not I’m playing the drums on the tracks on that link … now I gush about cell phones in a blog.)

If you live a split life, part-time musician, part-time web data analyst, check out the position announcement at Musician’s Friend. I can think of lots of bosses less cool than SYP (she’s even grooving on the latest from Wilco, Sky Blue Sky) and far less beautiful places to live than Ashland.

Have a look at the job posting and apply to Musician’s Friend today.

My wife needed something from the Apple store yesterday.  I didn’t want to go because I know how I am about new technology.  I told myself, “I will only look” and went so far as to leave my wallet in the car.  I told my wife, “I just got that new Blackberry and it’s really good”  and “I bet the iPhone is more hype than reality” and “I will only look.”
She just laughed at me.

While my daughter hunkered down at the kid’s playstation to play Dora the Explorer and my wife and son did their business, I casually picked up the iPhone.  “Hmmm” I thought, “It’s smaller and lighter than I thought it would be.”

I switched it on and poked around. I tried some typing, since that was my most obvious “out” based on the complaints people had.  Pretty easy, really, and not hard to imagine a software patch that would make it even easier.

Then I tried the web browser, opening up my own web site using iPhone’s Safari.  When I managed to close my mouth (my jaw had gone slack from the complete paradigm shift Apple has created in the mobile computing market with Safari on iPhone) I heard myself say to the nearest Apple store employee “I will take one of these, the really expensive one please.”
Damn you, Steve Jobs.  Damn you, damn you, damn you.
I didn’t need a new phone.  I didn’t need a new carrier.  I didn’t need to cancel a brand-new contract with Sprint.  I didn’t need a new iPod.  I didn’t need a new digital camera.  And I was completely helpless to do anything but pull out my credit card and pay the man.

My wife was laughing, openly.  “You are such a geek” she said.  Then I showed her how it works.  Now she wants an iPhone too.

Damn you, Apple.

If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t look.  Because if you’re like me, you will immediately recognize that for all the faults it might have, the iPhone is at least as revolutionary as everyone has said, perhaps more so.  The device itself is incredibly cool, it passes drop tests and scratch tests that I would never have tried with my Blackberry.  But it is the software, and just knowing that the entire thing is powered by code, that makes it disruptive.

As in disrupted my pocketbook to the tune of over $1,000 in about 5 minutes.  Damn you Steve Jobs.

I’m gonna go and place calls now, but I’ll leave you with this:

Apple iPhone, 8GB version: $599.00
Cancelled Sprint contract: $200.00
New AT&T contract: $119.00 (per month, plus taxes)
Not having to envy someone else’s iPhone every time I fly: PRICELESS

Damn you Steve Jobs.  Damn you for being such a visionary and for understanding the relationship between utility and uber-cool.  Damn you, damn you, damn you.