RSSNew Online Metrics–BW.com’s ‘Reader Engagement Index’
We all know that page views and unique views are on their way out. Right? That might be the prevailing wisdom, but, on the ground, that’s what we’re all still using to measure the popularity of our sites. We’re also using those metrics to sell our sites to advertisers. Some of you might also use time spent on site, bounce rate, and other metrics. But nobody is really happy with them. Why?
You rely on Google analytics, third party vendors, or internal software to measure page views and unique views. But how much of that is spiders? How much of that is real? Why does Nielsen give different results from comScore? And how do you know that your time spent on site numbers aren’t inflated by someone leaving their Web browser open and walking away? Did they really watch the entire video? And what about tab surfing? In short, these metrics are not completely reliable–they remind me of measuring print magazine engagement and readership: How many people see each copy; did certain ads make an impression; etc, etc, etc. Basically, in an age of computers, calculations, and hard numbers, we’re still making estimations and guesses.
John Byrne, executive editor at BusinessWeek.com, has a solution for some of you. Using two indisputable metrics, Byrne is able to create what he calls the “reader engagement index”. It’s simple. Take the number of comments posted on your site by readers and divide that by the number of stories you’ve posted. You end up with the number of comments per story. In the case of BW.com, that number is 23 for the month of December. That means that on average, for every story, blog posting, podcast, and video, BW.com gets 23 of its readers/users to give feedback and insight. That seems good to me, but I don’t really know; I’m curious to see January’s REI for BW.com.
There’s lots more to say on this. I’ll save it for later postings here and for the upcoming issue of min’s b2b.
Also, you can read my original post on the story, with more details on marketing and words from Byrne at minonline.
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I felt compelled to write a comment given that I read this post and my comment would count more than my page view. What I like about using commenting as a metric is that it is a more reliable indicator that someone actually read an article, while a page view (spiders aside) only means someone opened the page. However, far more people read than comment. While YouTube shows that many people are exhibitionists, not everyone is and I even find that lots of people email me feedback rather than post a comment because, I assume, they want to make their comment privately, even if it isn’t personal.