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Thursday, November 15, 2007

108 lbs of Gasoline??? Applying visits to pages...

...is like gaging gas consumption by pounds. Would you fill your car up with 100 LBS of gasoline? I bet you're scratching your head or clicking over to Google to find out how much a gallon of gasoline weighs, 6 - 7 LBS depending on the tempurature when you weigh it and if its deisel or not. Lots of different factors can effect the weight of gasoline; similar to the multi-faceted aspects that determine an actual visit. Not to mention our frame of reference, we're supposed to deal with liquids in terms of volume. And we're supposed to compute page usage via page views.

Let's not get confused with "Single Page Visits," visit sessions where visitors only view one page. Just my thought on a Thursday night.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have to disagree with you on this one, Adam. I think both have an important role to play in truly analyzing how your visitors interact with a given page.

Of course, like many metrics this becomes more powerful when two (or sometimes more) measurements are combined into a solid metric. In fact, I think one of the most potent metrics one can use to determine page usage is (Page Views/Visit). The metric, (Visits to the Page/Visits to the Site) can also yield valuable information, and is more likely to be of interest than (Page Views of the Page/Page Views for the whole site) for large sites.

Adam Berlinger said...

Thanks for your excellent feedback! We should always keep in minds that NONE of the metrics we have on hand should ever stand alone.

Anonymous said...

I like the headline for this item.

Pilots have fuel loaded onto airplanes by weight, and with the price of automobile gas these days, we should too! Who wants to 'pay' to lug around all that extra gas while running errands?

Your post is good food for thought and is a classic story of how it is easy to go off on a tangent based upon a single metric.