If you run a web startup , chances are that the question “how many pageviews are you getting..?” is more often than not used as a surrogate metric for your site’s current traction; The pageview has existed ever since the internet has been around and it made eminent sense when the internet was dominate by HTML web pages, largely containing static content. The number of time a page loaded (or its URL was called) was taken as a reasonably accurate representation of the consumption of the page content by users. So far so good.

Enter Web 2.0 and the pageview’s ability to adequately represent what it was originally meant for, has almost gone for a six (sorry for that cricket hangover, a la IPL!). For some of the things that make Web 2.0 what it is, are inherently at odds with this; consider these

Ajax: The widespread use of Ajax in web pages causes incorrect pageview counts. There are actually two diametrically opposite opinions here- some people report a bloated pageviews count due to Ajax, while some report a supressed number. My personal experience is that either of the situations is possible – it all depends on how the AJAX code is written, how the server is being pinged for additional within-page actions. And this miscalculation may be completely unintended- your developers may not realise it at all while writing the code. The realisation will come only if you do a careful profiling of server requests or look at your Google Analytics, Awstats, Webalizer, Urchin reports with a fine grained eye.

Rich Media: Websites where rich media dominates the content consumption e.g. videos, images, slideshows, podcasts etc would show a correct pageview count, but the watching of a video, slideshow etc while being a critical indicator of site stickiness, would not figure in the numbers at all. Hence there is likely to be a gross under-reporting of actual site activity and user engagement.

Widgets: Syndication of videos, images etc onto other websites & blogs through widgets adds another dimension to the pageviews conundrum; should the widget views be added to the pageviews? I think there is no general consensus here and different websites do their own thing.

At my own startup, we do look at our pageviews number, but with a pinch of salt. Other indicators like unique visitors, time spent on site per visit, no of clicks per visit etc in my opinion are better metrics to drive your business goals. As this post indicates, the internet world as started taking note of this anomaly. This post on Gigaom theorizes that the pageview should be replaced by engagement oriented metrics; AC Nielson apparently has stopped using pageviews as a metric for video sites, preferring ‘time spent on site‘.

Question to Indian web startups- whats your take on this?