Will Ajax cause the concept of page views to fade away?

Filed in archive AJAX on August 24, 2007

Till now web analytics was focusing on page views, unique visitors etc etc but the changes in technologies is all set to make these dimensions a thing of the past. The advent of Ajax has literally pushed the concept of page views to the backseat. All this is about to change as now more emphasis will be placed on the amount of time a visitor spends on a particular website rather than the page views generated.

In case you are opting for Web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax then page views wont help out here since in Ajax websites the whole page does not gets refreshed each time a user requests a change and though it improves the speed and functionality of the web page but at the end of the day it makes the concept of page views almost redundant. Take the case of Yahoo which saw its page views stats crashing when it adopted Ajax.

The concept of time would be meaningful in the case of blogs but what about highly visible sites such as Google where the concept of time would obviously fail. In case you are sticking to Web 1.0 technologies then you don't need to worry about the changes in web analytics but for how long will you be able to avoid the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. The industry certainly needs to consider the pros and cons before jumping on to the concept of time and discarding page views.