Ajax Rubs Out The Page View Metric? No. It Just Makes It More Real.

Steve Rubel points out that the page view as a metric is dead . As most things that are right, it's been standing in front of a lot of us for some time but not many people actually recognized it for what it is - and what it means in the context of Web Statistics. But I'll tell you that the page view hasn't died, it's simply changed.

Put away those dark clothes and stop crying. :-)

For the non-technical folks interested in page views as a metric - typically people with advertising on their site - AJAX is a change in that people no longer have to reload a page to do something. AJAX allows people to do things without having to reload pages. My experience has been that there is no significant difference, but this site is also relatively small in the grand scheme of things.

This site, which uses Drupal, has AJAX built in. Has AJAX affected the number of page views on this site? Not really, but KnowProSE.com fell out of Alexa's good graces a while back (and seems to be finding it's way back onstream). The majority of traffic to this site is through Google, where people are looking for specific things and hopefully find it laying around within the almost 17,000 pages (at the time of this writing).

What Statistics Should We Be Watching on AJAX enabled sites?

It really depends on what the site does. On a site which is highly interactive, the number of repeat users (loyalty) would be useful. On an informational site, it could simply be the number of unique visits and the ratio to page views - and while AJAX may decrease page views (and put less strain on a web server!), the ratio is still important - it's just less inflated. Where a person would have to (1) load the page, (2) do something and (3) reload the page - they now can all do it in one step.

In other words, instead of having 2 page views for one visit where a person leaves a comment you may have only one page view. And let's be serious - it's the same ads anyway. So the inflated level of page views decreases, and will be more likely to demonstrate whether the person actually moved to a different page while on the site.

If a site has a ratio of 1.5 page views per visit on an AJAX enabled site, it means that a visitor has a 50% chance of visiting another page once they arrive at the site. And what does that all mean? It depends on what your site is about.

Suggested reading is Peterson's Web Site Measurement Hacks, which I reviewed last year. The measurements have changed a bit with AJAX, but they have only changed in their interpretation. Understanding your site's workflow is important to understanding how to get measurements and analyze them.