comScore: "Visits" to change engagement level

comScore says a new metric measuring user visits to a specific site could replace the traditional pageview metric for advertisers. A visit is measured as the total amount of times a website is visited by one user each day, with 30 minutes between each visit.

by Kristina Knight

A pageview is the number of webpages on a site that are viewed within a specific time frame. By tracking visits rather than pageviews, comScore expects to better track a user's loyalty to a website and how engaged they are with the site.

“As technologies like AJAX change the Internet landscape, certain measures of engagement, such as page views, are diminishing in significance for many Web properties,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. “The introduction of these new metrics based on ‘visits’ provides an alternative for measuring user engagement that tells us how frequently visitors are actually returning to the site to view more content.”

AJAX and Flash technology don't create traditional pages, which make the old pageview metric useless, according to comScore. The advantage to these programs is that websites are more user-friendly and look better on the screen.

One potential problem is that pageviews correspond with advertising impressions and visits do not, but, by measuring the number of visits and the length of time spent on a site advertisers have a better idea of how users are spending their time.