Jeff recently forwarded me an article about Yahoo’s recent drop in page impressions as a result of implementing Ajax across their site. While this makes perfect sense to a technologist (Ajax is getting hype precisely because it allows users to access functions and content without full page loads), it spells a conundrum for less forward-thinking decision makers, like say, comScore.
Here’s the business thinker’s dilemma: when used appropriately, Ajax improves user experiences by speeding information retrieval and facilitating sophisticated interfaces. At the same time, it’s bad for Accounts Receivable if the company generates revenues from advertising, which is typical measured and invoiced based on page impressions (which are currently defined as full page loads). In a recent conversation with a prospective client, this same question came up: you’re not using too much Ajax are you? The fear wasn’t that we were going to scare away users with pointlessly advanced features but that we were going to provide a world of functionality in a single page impression.
The previously-mentioned Yahoo article sums up the real-world cost of effective Ajax implementations:
The possibility that analytics measurement schemes could be months, if not years, behind the times could actually be good news for sites such as CNET, whose stock value and even corporate status have come under fire recently in the face of page view numbers that appeared to decline by 55% just between September 2005 and September 2006. During that period, CNET instituted a radical simplification of its Web page structure that includes the use of tools such as Asynchronous JavaScript. CNET’s analytics service is comScore.
And who is the big winner? MySpace, a site that is successful in spite of it’s abysmal UI. If you have a MySpace account you know what I’m describing: completing any flow in MySpace seems to require one too many clicks. Don’t hold your breath waiting for improvements – those extra clicks contribute to the site’s “metrics” and in turn drive up it’s valuation.
The Internet isn’t a clickable magazine
The source of this problem is the dual nature of the Internet experience, as described by Jesse James Garrett in The Elements of User Experience. On the one hand, Web interfaces are documents, and on the other they are software applications. Advertising metrics are founded in the document side of the issue – documents are best displayed on a per-page basis, so it’s easy to measure the popularity of a site by counting the number of documents (new articles, personal profiles, movie listings) users access in a day. The recent improvements in client-side JavaScript are enabling more sites to explore the other half, the webpage-as-application side of the user experience. In these cases, clicks are more than links from one document to another; they often include subtler transactions such as filtering query results on Kayak. Unlike documents, increased page views in applications are typically an indicator of inefficient transactions.
So, here’s a new formula for Google to improve their stock price: simply insert an interstitial page between the search box and a user’s search results. comScore would report a 100% increase in user activity, and Wall Street would reward the improvement accordingly. Sadly, Google seems to be exploring a CPM (cost per thousand page impressions) ad model for their popular AdSense program, in lieu of their original CPC (cost per thousand clicks on the ad itself), which rewarded real interaction with the ad itself, rather than unrelated browser activity.
My heart goes out to the engineers at Yahoo and CNET: good user experience – “a radical simplification” of a site’s IA – results in declining stock values. For Christmas, I’m giving comScore the finger.