In today's Online Publishing Update, I included a quote from a column by comScore Chief Research Officer Josh Chasin. In his column, which ran in the Washington Post this weekend, Chasin argues in favor of the "engagement" metric for measuring Web sites.
Chasin comes to this conclusion after arguing, rightly, that the page view metric is out of date and unreliable. This, he says, is because there are frequent, documented discrepencies in page view measurement depending on whether a person is looking at numbers from the server logs or from one or more of the many traffic measurement services. Also, there is some concern that Ajax, which allows content on a page to refresh without refreshing the entire Web page, may skew the number of Web page views artificially lower – something media companies that sell advertising certainly don’t want.
To Chasin’s credit, he does acknowledge the problem of multitasking (though I will point out it’s not just something teenagers do, as he seems to think). Chasin writes:
Engagement represents an attempt to capture the quality of a consumer's exposure to content. Not all exposures are engaged exposures, and we want our measurement of ad media to account for the difference. It goes beyond "how many?" and "how much?" to ask "how good?"
I, for example, am not a good engager: As I've mentioned before, I do a lot of what Comcast calls "televisiphonernetting," or watching television while surfing the Web and talking to someone on the phone. I also get distracted easily, even when I'm not necessarily multitasking. I'm at work now, but I have five tabs open in my Web browser, plus I have our NAA membership database, an Excel spreadsheet and my Outlook open. Oh -- and someone just started a Gmail chat with me. Hang on...
So I am representative of the problem with the engagement metric. Unless I'm really focusing on one thing or I'm on a deadline, I'm not really engaged with anything.
With people like me in mind, Chasin proposes having two “duration-based” metrics – “time spent” and “engaged time spent”. "What if we could track the time consumers spend with each Web property -- pages, audio, video, IM or widgets -- in a way that allows for capturing multitasking behavior?" he wrote.
So here’s comScore’s exciting announcement, buried toward the end of Chasin’s column:
At comScore, we plan to introduce an engaged duration metric this year. We're able to track engagement with a Web entity with software that allows us to "see" exactly what applications or sites users are interacting with. Even if users have three or four browser windows open at once, we can track when a particular window becomes active.
More accurate numbers, which this new metric could potentially provide, would certainly alleviate some advertisers’ concerns about the accuracy of page view numbers, questions about how “time spent” on a Web site is actually spent and more.
For newspapers – an industry built largely on honesty and audience, with some unfortunate history of circulation inflating – this could be a real boon. With these numbers, ad reps could go to advertisers with an even stronger, data-backed story about the real value of newspapers online. Also, this measurement could really help the editorial side look closely at what articles and multimedia features are holding site visitors’ interest, which can only help them learn how to build even more engaging features.