Tuesday, July 10, 2007

New landscape, new ways of measurement

Nielsen Net Ratings have announced their adoption of dwell time as their new lead metric, replacing the long standing page view measurement. For sometime now, pageviews have been a bit bogus, and it's conversion (eg click through and eventual sale) that has been of most interest to brands and agencies alike. After all, what use is 5million page impressions if only 500 click through and bother to take a look at what you're selling / showing.

Dwell time takes into account the abundance of richer user interfaces. With the likes of AJAX allowing for more seamless, non-linear actions online, page refresh becomes a bit meaningless if the use is able to do everything within one space far more effeciently.

Rich media agencies have used this metric for some time now, with total time of interaction being a fair reflection of total brand engagement within a piece of online advertising. This takes these principles into the service areas, online stores, news portals, and gives companies a lear steer on where their customer services could be improved and optimised. Or summat.

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