The page view doesn’t have to die. It just needs some help. One little metric can’t carry the weight of the internet anymore. (Sure hits did it for a while, then stickiness then eyeballs and even clicks, but those were the old days…)

The problem is that we need to understand at least four basic aspects of life online:

• Traffic - The flow of visitors in and out of our sites is critical in a world where dollars are spent on ads and paid search, word of mouth programs and organic search optimization. We need to know where these visitors come from, what they do after they arrive (this visit and in their ‘lifetime’), and then calculate the ROI of our investment in acquiring them.
  
  
• Sites – While we can increasingly syndicate content and distribute widgets, the majority of our time and energy still goes into building and maintaining web sites, and we need to know how those sites and (yes) the web pages that comprise them are being used. What’s new is that we can no longer assume the page is a static element – it can now contain dynamic content, elements syndicated from other locations, AJAX and other levels of interaction and progressive or reactive disclosure, and significant personalization or contextualization. So we need to know not only what pages visitors saw in what order and how many times (and for how long) but also what content was on those pages when they saw them and how they interacted with that content in that environment.
  
  
• Content – Chunks of content live free and independent lives these days. A chunk of text can appear on many different pages of a single site, and/or be syndicated across any number of sites. Widgets and videos enable important interaction at the content level (which we need to know all about) but can simultaneously live in lots of places both on our site and across the web. We need to be able to look at both the interactions with any widgets we’ve imported (the widget owner cannot withhold that data) and the aggregate interactions with any widgets or content we’ve distributed. Ads are just chunks, so this applies to them too.
  
  
• People – The elements and constructs above only exist to serve people, whose money it is all of these web pages are really chasing. Yet the current crop of analytics software and conventional metrics only let us see glimpses of these people in the shadows of clicks and page views. We need to be able to segment users not only by where they come from and what pages they see, but by inferred or explicit personas, psychographics, scenarios, intents, and the type of content they interact with and the way in which they interact. We then need to clearly tie these folks to content, sites, traffic sources, and success events.
  
  

If I were developing a new analytics platform I’d consider the needs of each of these four aspects separately, and design both the data collection and reporting for each based on their unique needs. Current systems start with the click and then the page and try to spread this very thin data across all of them. It doesn’t work and as both the industry and people working in it become more mature and sophisticated this is becoming clearer and therefore less tolerable.

The increasingly loud complaints about the page view are the sound of a market opportunity for the next wave of web analytics products. For all of our sakes I hope someone jumps on this quick.