Insightful post from Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion who questions the value of popular online marketing metrics “page views”, “unique visitors” and “time spent” – all metrics I currently use to measure our sites. The questions he raise are the same questions I continually ask myself when reviewing these stats – particularly how valuable a page view metric really is? We’ve done campaigns which have spiked our traffic but had little impact on quote requests coming through our sites, which is a metric I use to measure how effective our traffic is. Sites that use Ajax and Flash and that are highly interactive and could be delivering a better and more engaging user experience, don’t even show up as a page view. Steve mentions how Google Analytics (available for free btw, like you don’t already know) delivers a metric around events which measure the amount of interaction a user has within a page. As a marketer, this is more meaningful. High, meaningless traffic is useless for a business selling products and services to a targeted audience. Gaining a better understanding on how interested visitors engage with my sites, is much more meaningful. You can read more at Steve’s site.