In his post about the new Netscape mail system, Jason Calacanis made an excellent point about site design. When you design pages using AJAX, you actually lose page views. In today Internet economy losing Page views means losing money.
This brings up a very important question - What are you going for, better user experience or better statistics for your site?I wonder if there is anyone out there who measured the number of page views sites are losing because of the use of AJAX. How many page views did Yahoo lost after redesigning their home page to use more AJAX? Did in turn the use of AJAX brought enough more traffic to compensate this loss? If MySpace would use a more slick AJAX design, would they still be the most successful site on the Internet?
I guess those questions just emphasize the problem of traditional measurement of CPM. Instead of simply measuring the number of times an ad was served, it is probably better if we could have measured an ad effectiveness using the following criteria:
- Number of unique user sessions the ad was served to
- Amount of time people watched the ad
- The rate between number of times the as was served to the number of times it was actually clicked on
Put those criteria into a formula that gives each one a factor, and you'll get the real CPM an advertiser should pay for the ad.
UPDATE: An after thought... How does HitWise and Comscore measure page views statistics? If I do 5 AJAX calls when I load my page, do they "catch" them and count them as 5 page hits?
Maybe the use of AJAX is actually doing the opposite - inflating your page views count?