Loading ...Page views are becoming increasingly irrelevant for Web applications, and it’s all thanks to Ajax which, if you’re not au fait with the hippest development techniques on the Web, is a way of bring content in to a page without having to refresh the entire page.
If you’ve ever made a ‘Wall post’ on Facebook, you’ve seen Ajax in full effect, and you certainly didn’t experience a page refresh whilst you told Uncle Phil how drunk you were last Friday (just under 70 million users and counting, there has to be pets, parents, grandparents, and uncles & aunties by now). Obviously, this Ajax-powered process puts the ‘page-view’ metric in jeopardy.
If the page-view measurement is on the way out, or at least taking the sidelines in the usual arsenal of Web site user tracking tools, we’ll need new methods of understanding what our visitors are really doing on our .coms.
Today, Josh Catone, of ReadWriteWeb, picked up a post from a company called Alenty (whose logo seriously reminds me of the Half-Life logo, they have good taste). The guys at Alenty are demoing a tracking tool for the new Web - a Web sprinkled with Ajax and more advanced user interactions - and you really have to check it out:
The aforementioned posts have probably explained it better than I’ll ever do, but I’ll tell you what I like most about it. The screenshot, above, shows a blog post, user comments, and the new-fangled analytics tool (on the right of the screen - it’s a little intrusive, but at least you won’t miss the whole point of the excerise!). Read the blog post? Slide comments in to view, and the tracker will measure the time that you, the user, spends engaged in the comments. It takes in to account the data visible in the browser chrome, and the mouse movements, too (that would’ve been a deal breaker!).
So, you could forget working out who’s made the most comments on your website. Instead, why not calculate the person who’s comments spend the longest up on screen? That sounds far more interesting to me. However, it’s a matter of doing something with the data after you’ve gathered it, and proving that it really does give you some different insights in to how people behave on our sites. If it just tells us the same old story, but with a new, technological twist; it may be more trouble (and processing power) than it’s worth. Unless you’re Microsoft, of course.
Check out the tool and let me know what you think. In fact, I’d love to know which analytical tools you use at the moment (Google, CrazyEgg, something I’ve never heard of?), so please leave a comment or two telling me how you think this tool compares to your existing tracking tools…
