Site Tracking Shifts from Page Views to Time Spent on Site

One of the top site analytic/measuring companies in the world, Nielson/NetRatings, announced plans to shift from reporting Page Views as the metric of how popular a site is, to using how long users spend on a website (or Time Spent on Site).

With the continued emergence of AJAX, dynamic content, online videos and other new technologies, the “page view” has lost it’s accuracy, which has led marketers to rely on other metrics like “time spent on site”.

There’s a lot of talk about how this affects where Google ranks among other sites… The talks are trivial in my opinion, since Google is primarly a search engine and visitors aren’t suppose to spend a lot of time on the site. The visitor is suppose to quickly find what they’re looking for and go to another website. Spend time worrying about non-search engine sites, not Google.

Cory Howell is the SEO Strategist of MorePro Marketing. His 10 years of experience in all facets of Internet marketing ensures our clients a valued service using the latest SEO strategies including, site construction, content, site linking, social media marketing as well as paid search. @moreSEOtips on Twitter