2006 has been the year of the death of the page view. The page view was a simple number that has been used to represent the amount of activity or accomplishment a person executed on a web page. But with new technology like AJAX and widgets, the number of times a person clicks, or the number of times the page reloads or refreshes has become completely irrelevant to how substantial or how successful a user session has been.

To further complicate the matter, a slightly deeper consideration of how people and ‘pages’ interact tells us that some page designs and content structures are simply more efficient at getting things done – so it might take one site four pages to ‘give’ the user what another site can give them in one page. Has a site with a three-page shopping cart accomplished more than a site with a one page shopping cart if they both get the sale?

Bryan Eisenberg first delivered the death notice with the even bolder statement that the ‘Web Page is Dead’. Steve Rubel then focused on the use of page views as the counter for advertising sales & revenue. But this week the concept hits the mainstream, because comScore Media Metrix announced that MySpace overtook Yahoo as the ‘king of the internet’ and Yahoo responded by saying that PageViews are now an irrelevant way to count. Ironically, MySpace had previously been critiqued for having a woefully inefficient design that unnecessarily inflated page-views.

Web analytics users and vendors need to take this death march very seriously. Both are far too page-view-centric and switching over to the new reality is going to take some time.

For vendors, the changing nature of a page impacts not only the centrality of page views but also the role and content of fallout reports, page overlay activity reports, and more. And more important than what’s broken from of the old is what’s missing from the new. How do we measure ‘content chunks’ which only appear when requested and get used in multiple places around the site as well is in syndicated locations? How do we see the path within a page much like we used to see the path between pages? How do components on a page influence each other and desired outcomes?

For users, beyond demanding that the vendors start both working on these solutions and talking to us about them, the most important need is for a new concept to replace the page view as the ‘center’ of activity reporting. Eric Peterson has been talking about the concept of ‘engagement’ and it sounds like the right concept. There are some nasty details to work both in the definitions and implementation, but the discussions and work should begin.

I’d personally like to see something like an engagement point system. One point for showing up, one for staying more than 3 pages, one for watching the entirety of an online video, two for revisiting a product twice in one session, two for putting anything in your cart or signing up for something (email subscription etc.), and on and on. A user defined system that then allows me to look at users and traffic sources and campaigns and page chunks by the segments user points.

It’s just one on-the-fly idea. The farther I get into web analytics the more I think it needs a ground-up re-think. Let’s use the death of the web page to revitalize both the software and the way we use it.

Update: Google's Matt Cutts weighs in on AJAX, Yahoo, and Page Views.