Nielson/NetRatings has said they will no longer provide rankings on numbers of Web pages viewed on a Web site.  What they are now going to count is total amount of time spent on the site and number of visits to the site.  And then they interview comScore a competitor.  What does all of this mean?  Not much in my opinion, but the stats are fun to pick over and look at.  Grow up boys and girls there are better things to fret over.

What would mean something to me is being able to count the conversion rates.  Look at Staples.com and you will see that site is designed for speed not time spent.  If you want to buy a bunch of pencils you want to get on and get off fast.  Bottom line, is we have technology that can measure a bunch of different factors.  Understand the factors that matter to your conversions the most and make the adjustments so that you and your visitors get max value.

The reason that many of the advertising networks do not like this change is that it hurts their business models.  If the number of banners on a site are loaded 500 times because each of the 50 visitors see an average of 10 pages that is great.  But at the end of the day how many of the banners had click throughs?  Let’s face it it really comes down to refinement and segmentation of audience….then we will see the conversions. 

I just issued a press release yesterday and it has 400 reads so far.  So many prints and so many downloads.  I do not care how many times they clicked through, how much time they spent on the web site(s)  The only thing I care about is phone calls for interviews from the media as well as product orders.

Here is the article I was referring to in Forbes