In regards to Nick’s point, I think as practitioners we will all have to keep ourselves focused on the user and what they experience. Terminology aside, if a user clicks on something do they think of that as a server call? or a page view? or just a click? It really depends on the particular functionality. What about just thinking about them as one of a series of events in our relationship with the user? In the end, how it impacts the user’s relationship with our site is the really important bit.

I think whatever new terms come about, if we keep that always at the forefront, we’ll be able to deliver worthwhile insight.

In regards to Rainn’s point, I agree a lot of statistics are lost for pages that are the only page visited in the session. But are they truly important statistics if the user did not convert? If the visitor did not convert, then its likely the landing page was ineffective, regardless of how long they had the page open in their browser. Not that that excuses technology for letting all of us down, but I think a way to work around this problem is to focus analysis on the landing pages that DO work, rather than those that don’t. Testing marketing creative in advance on users is another way to ensure these pages are at least marginally effective before the money is spent.

Re: Average Visit Duration – No, single-page visits are not included in the total visits in the denominator of the calculation. However, single-page visits ARE included in the total number of visits and in the total visits in the denominator of the calculation for Average Page Views Per Visit.

Angie – You are more than welcome. We appreciate all the WAA does, it helps raise the profile of the entire industry and that benefits all of us.

I participated in establishing IAB standards when I was on the agency/client-side and recall the relief when companies we were advertising with finally spoke the same language. Literally 1000’s of hours were saved in re-sizing graphics alone!

I look forward to meeting you on our next meeting, and thank you for your participation.

Angie Brown
Co-Chair, WAA Standards

Considering that the industry as a whole seems to be moving away from page views and back to server requests as a result of Web 2.0 and AJAX implementations how is this going to affect the definition of “Page View” or “Page”?

For Visit Duration, or rather Average Visit Duration, are zero-length visits (i.e. single page visits) included in the “total visits” number that is the denominator of the calculation?