What Moving From Page Views To Time Is All About

Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings, explains the theory and practice behind the company’s promotion of total time as the key user engagement metric for online…

Many of you will be aware that Nielsen//NetRatings recently announced that we are actively promoting total time as the key user engagement metric, alongside more traditional measures such as page views and sessions. Naturally, advertisers and publishers are keen to know what it means for them because the page view has been the key advertising currency online in many web environments. Mainly, this was because each user page request triggered new ads to be served on the new page and, thus, the page view as a gauge of the online ad opportunity.

So, why the move to the ‘total time’ metric? Our decision has partly been brought about by the increasing incorporation in site design of technologies such as Rich Internet Applications (e.g. AJAX), Flash and streaming (content and audio/video) that replace the need for full page refreshes. Essentially, RIA technologies result in users consuming less content through successive reloaded ‘static’ pages, as a wide range of content is now available within a single page.

For example, think of the difference between watching a ten-minute news video online as opposed to clicking though to ten different pages/articles of text. A user only needs to make one request for a ten-minute video and today’s rules would consider this only one page view. One page view in this context clearly underestimates the true amount of opportunity for an ad, or number of ads, that can be served to that user during those ten minutes – whether they are ads embedded in the video (as with commercial breaks in TV) or rotating image ads on the page.

RIA technologies mean that as the user experience becomes more fluid and dynamic, many online sectors are forced to rely less on the page view as the most reliable ad opportunity currency as it is a less relevant guide of how users are behaving online. So whilst the page view remains important, in that it still reflects user activity, it isn’t the best reflection of the volume of user activity seen on a site. Whilst Unique Audience is still the default metric for comparing how many people a site/application reaches, the industry has to look elsewhere for a more relevant and equitable advertising ‘currency’ in terms of the volume of behaviour this audience accounts for – hence the ‘time’ metric.

It’s worth pointing out that we are talking about genuine ‘in-focus’ time here; our desktop meter measures the single application/tab in focus – the one that is in the foreground of the desktop – regardless of how many are open at any time. Furthermore, if there is 30 minutes of inactivity on the desktop, the time is ‘dialled back’ to one minute after the last user activity. For example, if I surf around a news site for 15 minutes then leave my computer for an hour, only 16 minutes of my time is credited to that news site.

So how does the landscape – the share-of-voice between different online sectors – change when one looks at ‘time’ versus ‘page views’? Overall, the most popular category – ‘Search Engines, Portals and Communities’ – loses share as it accounts for 26% of all UK page views compared to 17% of total UK time. It is overtaken by the ‘Telecoms/Internet Services’ category, which contains the instant messaging applications. This category almost doubles its share of voice – from 13% of all page views to 25% of total minutes. The ‘Search Engines, Portals and Communities’ category is also overtaken by ‘Entertainment’ which has 21% of total minutes (compared to 19% of page views).

Time as a metric is about consistency; it brings all web environments into play, regardless of technology/site design, including those traditionally marginalised by the page-view such as applications, videos and games. Not surprisingly, these sectors show the biggest leaps in share of voice when shifting to the time metric from page views – as content in these environments isn’t consumed through successive pages of ‘static’ content but rather through a more ‘animated’ fluid process.

Instant Messaging sites, for example, account for just 4% of all UK page views but account for over 13% of total ‘in-focus’ time. Games site’s share doubles from 2.6% of all pages to 5.4% of time. ‘Software manufacturers’ and ‘Multi-category Entertainment’ sites, which include applications such as Windows Media Player and iTunes, are the other beneficiaries of a ‘time’ landscape. ‘Software’ makes up just 1% of page views but 5% of time – ‘Multi-category Entertainment’ also makes up just 1% of page views but 3.3% of total time.

Time as a metric gives a more complete view of the whole internet to the advertiser and shows, in the modern web age, how fragmented internet consumption really is. The online population has a wonderful array of technologies to consume content through and they are starting to use them in greater numbers! It also illustrates how important it is for publishers to evaluate the changes these RIA technologies bring.

Time as a metric is a nudge to publishers that the priority should be improving the user experience, and a reassurance that this can be done without necessarily reducing ad inventory. After all, advertisers want to be shown an engaged user-base – in terms of the amount of opportunity they have for their ad to be seen – and an effective and efficient platform to reach them.