If you run a website and are trying to impress someone -- an advertiser, an executive in your company, or just your Aunt Agnes -- the term "page view" is a handy shortcut.
"We get eight million page views a day," you can say confidently. Unfortunately, if they ask what that means exactly, you will have to say (if you're being honest) that it can mean many different things, depending on who is talking.
In many ways, the page view is a holdover from the early days of the Web, when accumulating the largest number of "eyeballs" was the name of the game. But it still commands attention, particularly when a company wants to raise money or attract a takeover offer.
There is a growing sense in the industry, however, that website operators and Web service companies need better tools than just the page view if they are to attract more serious business and ad interest.
"Page views as an indicator ... of the vibrancy of a site [are] somewhat obsolete," Vivek Shah, president of digital publishing at Time Warner, told The Wall Street Journal recently.
In some cases, page-view figures can quickly become almost absurd. MySpace or Facebook like to talk about how they get more than a billion page views every day, and Facebook said recently that its page views increased by more than 50 per cent in just the last month, to 1.5 billion a day.
As many have pointed out, these kinds of figures can be easily boosted. MySpace has been criticized for making it impossible to do anything without clicking through four or five pages, and Facebook is similar.
Many news and media websites split their articles into tiny chunks and spread them across several pages so that readers have to click through dozens of times. Those inflated page views are then boasted about to advertisers.
Another problem with the page view as a traffic yardstick is that interactive or "Web 2.0" sites -- such as Google's Gmail or the Flickr photo-sharing site -- use a form of dynamic programming that doesn't require a user to load a new page every time they do something. That makes the page view virtually useless as a measurement.
"As the technology that publishers use to deliver content to the user moves away from static, reloaded pages to more streamlined content such as online videos, the page view is becoming a less relevant gauge of where might be the best place to advertise online," said Nielsen/NetRatings analyst Alex Burmaster.
As a result of those and other flaws, website operators and advertisers have started focusing on other measurements that provide more useful information. One of the first was "unique visitors," a term that refers to the number of viewers that come to a site, as tracked by IP address and a text-file "cookie" that gets deposited on a visitor's computer.
Cookies have their flaws as well, however. One problem is that many people delete their cookies, which tends to distort the statistics - by as much as 150 per cent, according to one estimate.
More recently, two major Web measurement companies -- Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrics -- have said they are turning their backs on the page view and designing their own ways of measuring "engagement."
Nielsen said in a news release that it is going to focus on what it calls "time-spent" data, which will track how long a visitor spends on a site, and comScore also said that it is working on data about "visits," which would aggregate the number of visits and total time spent by a user over a month.
Using those new tools, comScore said that while Facebook was the 36th most-visited website in February, with 16.7 million unique visitors, it was the second most engaging site in the survey, with more than 23 visits per user that month.
One problem with a time-spent measurement, however, is that newer Web browsers allow people to open multiple pages in a series of "tabs," even though they may spend the bulk of their time on only one of those pages. It's not clear how Nielsen or comScore would handle that activity.
What is clear is that both website operators and advertisers are looking for new ways of not just tracking raw users, but figuring out who is staying on their site and actually interacting with it, rather than just being a passive set of eyeballs.
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