There’s lots of chatter about the need for a better metric standard than the page view. My colleague, Pat McCarthy, offers a nice summary as well as suggestions for alternatives to the embattled page view. Another interesting discussion is evolving where the page view is dead (illustration), and we are now also mourning the Death of the User.

I wrote a column on this 2.5 years ago (Pricing Your Identifiable Audience) arguing that advertisers buy people, not ads (let alone, pages), so we need to measure impressions actually made on people, not impressions served to pages. My context at the time was data-enabled targeting, which publishers can use to better identify and price different segments of their audience based on measurable value to advertisers.

This is a difficult business. Web publishing is too measurable when it suits our interests (advertiser unhappy with results) and always inconsistent from one source to the next.

Publishers only need to be concerned about a few internal metrics. Pat offers “revenue per unique user” as a meaningful indicator of a site’s ability to effectively monetize its audience over time. This is also a good way to speak to your advertisers, as in “(fill in the metric) per unique audience.” If you have confidence in your ability to apply effective frequency caps, you gain an edge over competitors who pulverize their visitors with uncapped ads long after someone has responded or shown that they never will.

Which brings us to the one truth: results. If advertisers do their jobs right, and you do yours, then you should be able to offer the right result for the right price. Can you show your advertisers a range of acceptable metrics that demonstrate the proper exchange of results they seek for value you receive? Do you know the value of an impression on your site as well as the correct price that will produce, for example, a new customer acquisition at or below the targeted cost by type of offer?

That’s a whole lot of data. It’s worth figuring out how to extract and use it. One way you can leapfrog your competitors in knowledge that improves performance is through open API’s that allow you to use non-personally identifiable data in ad server decisioning. Why fight the page views battle when you can win the war for results?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 12:51 pm and is filed under About Right Media, Right Media Exchange, Publishers, Publisher Media Exchange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.