midsummer metrics madness

So by now chances are you’ve read the Big News — that Nielsen NetRatings is dropping page views as a primary metric for measuring web traffic in favor of time on site — the average number of minutes a user spends on your website.

The web analytics community is all atwitter. But how does this or should this affect the non-profit world?

Maybe not so much.

Most of the web metrics that Nielsen and other track have to do with advertising. Unless your non-profit’s business model depends on selling ads on your website, most of these metrics — page views, etc. — are not all that useful.

M&R, Convio and others have done respectable jobs of benchmarking non-profit web and email performance, but no one has really made the case for which metrics matter in the context of what we do. That’s a conversation that is long overdue.