The Script Converter Lab lets users read the text of any script in the supported languages, which currently consist of:

- Hindi
- Bengali
- English
- Gujarati
- Kannada
- Malayalam
- Marathi
- Nepali
- Tamil
- Telugu

All you have to do is enter text or a web address in the box, select the language you want to read it in, and press convert.

This lab could potentially be incredibly useful as the web expands into non-Latin-character-language domains.

Google’s Related Links lab is a tool to help webmasters increase page views. Google describes the feature: "Given a page on your site, Related Links can choose the most related pages from your site and show them in a gadget. You can embed this gadget in your page to help your users reach other pages easily."

In addition, Related Links suggests searches that users can run within your site to find even more related pages.

The Related Links lab is currently available on an invitation-only basis. Anyone can apply for an invitation, however. There is a demo you can use here that will give you an idea of how it works.

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> ICANN Approves International Domains

> Google "Similar Images" Feature Goes From Labs to Actual Feature

> Google Website Optimizer Gets an API

“Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic,” said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen. “We’re changing our stance on how the data should be” used.

Nielsen will still provide page view figures but won’t formally rank them. Ross said page view remains a valid gauge of a site’s ad inventory, but time spent is better for capturing the level of engagement users have with a site.

The venerable pageview has been done in by increasing adoption of new technologies, principally Ajax and streaming video. Ajax allows users to update page content without actually pulling a new page from the server, while video allows users to view continuously changing content on the same page. In sites with heavy Ajax or video components, users may spend considerable time on the site and even interact with the site while generating no new pageviews; this makes comparing page view statistics with other sites an unreliable indicator of relative time spent or visitor engagement.

Scott Karp at Digital Media Wire points out, “But time spent is an equally problematic metric that assumes that more is better, which isn’t the case with web applications designed for efficiency, like Google search. Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.’s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted.” Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web thinks that time spent may be a better indicator of user involvment in blogs, particularly those with longer, higher quality articles vs. blogs with a large volume of low-content posts. Darren Reed at Problogger notes that pageviews still have some importance from an advertising standpoint, since ad revenue is often impression-based.

The Inherent Unreliability of Web Metrics. Measuring time spent on a site may present its own technical challenges, but in some cases it should be a better indicator of visitor behavior. And ANY web statistics must be taken with a grain of salt. Marketing types love to throw out numbers for “unique visitors,” for example, as if someone checked IDs at the door to the website. In fact, lots of things go wrong with unique visitors and most other web stats. Various automated bots and spiders can affect counts, users clear cookies or don’t accept them in the first place, visitors disable Javascript, ISPs use multiple IP addresses for the same user session… For busy sites, these issues no doubt average out; nevertheless, it’s important to recognize the inherent imprecision in just about all web statistics. (For a eye-opener, try comparing a script-based analytics tool like Google Analytics with a server log analysis tool like NetTracker – you may be suprised by the differences in results between the two well-regarded programs.)

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Nielsen Saying No To Page View Metrics

There has to be a better way to acquire an accurate look at a website and the traffic it draws. We discussed Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman told us his firm’s take on the subject. Panels and pixels play the measurement role there.

An AP report discussed Nielsen//NetRatings and its measurement future. They are expected to announce an end to rankings based on page views.

Nielsen’s measurements will show the total time spent and sessions for all visitors, in addition to the averages of time spent and sessions per visitor that it presently reports. AP noted this will mean ranking sites by time spent will benefit AOL, and push it ahead of perennial page view leader Yahoo.

Ajax has been a big culprit in the downfall of the page view. Yahoo and other sites program their pages in Ajax to dynamically refresh content on a page, without refreshing the page itself.

That is a boon for viewers, but pure poison to page view metrics. Even though visitors may be viewing just as much content as they usually do, Ajax makes it appear they are not. That has a direct impact on advertising rates.

It’s obvious that what he’s saying is true that page views are becoming less relevant as new technologies such as AJAX and the use of widgets change what a page view really means. I don’t think there is an argument there, but I think it will be very interesting to see what becomes the new standard of measurement.

Unique visitors, visits, and page views have been the big three in terms of measuring traffic, and although it’s not really usually reported in the media I’d say ad impressions are really the most important metric for all the web business relying on advertising. If we write page views off as really being that important, what steps in?

Unique Visitors

The argument for unique visitors is that it is the core of really seeing how many real people are visiting a website. It’s the best way to measure audience size. The downside is that audience size isn’t the only measure of a website’s value or traffic. How often do those visitors visit? How long do they stay? How much revenue do they generate?

Total Visits

Although it doesn’t measure true human audience size, total visits can give a better indication than unique visitors how much action is really occurring on a site. But there are still too many questions. What’s better, 100k unique visitors, or 200k total visits?

Ad Impressions

A metric that’s been left out of most debates is ad impressions. One reason is that it’s generally not included in analytics solutions, and it tends to not work on sites that don’t make advertising a priority. It’s also very easy to manipulate as you can just double the amount of ads on each page to double your ad impressions. While that will double your ad impressions, it didn’t change your actual traffic, and it actually probably won’t double your ad revenue. Additionally, the amount you earn is very important in making this reliable. While Myspace may have passed Yahoo in page views due to Yahoo’s change to AJAX, Yahoo is making a heck of a lot more money from advertising because they earn much more per ad impression.

What if we get inventive and start using combination metrics like “revenue per unique visitor” which is really combining ad impressions, unique visitors, and the revenue per ad impression. That’s a metric I’d love to see more of because I think it really provides a good measure of how different industries can monetize users.

We may not really be able to come up with a solution that works in all cases, because often different metrics are more important to different people for different reasons. If we’re just concerned with how many people a site reaches, than unique visitors works. If we are more concerned with who’s making the most money, we are concerned with ad impressions and ad revenue. In the case of the Yahoo vs. Myspace clash, I think what people are trying to measure is just what site is “bigger” or gets “used more”. I think it’s clearly obvious that Yahoo has a larger audience, and generates more money, but how do we measure “usage”. Average session time multiplied by unique visitors to get a total monthly usage time measurement? There can be some problems with measuring average sessions on a site as well, it’s not a perfect science yet.

Measurement on the changing web is a complex question, but whoever manages to solve these questions will be a leader in the online measurement space.

Related Posts:

• Blog Audience Measurement at the Blog Business Summit
• Google Analytics Launches a Blog

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Pat is the Director of Business Development at Right Media, the business unit owner for RMX Direct, and the author of the Conversion Rater blog.

Earlier in the week, comScore Media Metrix disclosed that MySpace had surpassed Yahoo in terms of page views. While it may be a feel good story for News Corp, it isn’t a complete story either.

Yahoo explained the shift as one that reflected its heavier reliance on Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, dubbed Ajax. It’s a method of making web pages more alive for their viewers thanks to their ability to bring new content to the page without downloading it again from a server.

Ajax is having a greater impact than user convenience. Micro Persuasion blogger Steve Rubel declared the page view as advertising metric a dying concept.

As web companies using Ajax extensively realize this, there will be a greater clamor to adopt a new metric for measuring the effectiveness of an online ad campaign. The Internet Advertising Bureau has been working on crafting a standard for this.

Yahoo dominates MySpace in terms of unique visitors, a total approaching 130 million per month in October. They are serving that audience while reducing the number of times those visitors have to go from one page to the next for information.

While that pleases users, it doesn’t help Yahoo or its display advertising clients. Display ads generate revenue on a CPM basis. Fewer page views mean fewer opportunities to show visitors those ads.

Conditions look ready for a shift to unique visitors over page views for purposes of measuring advertising impact. Advertisers will want to audit that information, and websites shifting to that model will have to keep their advertisers happy.

Transparency into the operations of sites like Yahoo will be a factor in determining measurement. Yahoo will not want to just hand over raw server logs to advertisers, so the stage may be set for third-party firms, perhaps the big names in the accounting business, to step into a role as independent and confidential auditors of that information.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Steve Rubel argues that so-called Web 2.0 applications built in Flash, AJAX, and other technologies will allow users to see and do everything they want from within a single page, rendering page views as a form of measurement inaccurate. In a comment to Steve’s post, I suggested RSS feeds also diminish the page view’s value. I breeze through several hundred pages ever morning, sometimes twice a day, ignoring sites with no new content and rarely visiting the sites whose content does interest me-I read it directly from the news reader that never touches the web page.

The uptake of RSS has been slow, mostly because it was too geeky for most people to get started. But most browsers have subscription and feed management built in, and Internet Explorer 7 has its RSS integration down cold.

Advertisers, of course, depend on page views to assess the value of a site as a venue for their ads, so as the page view fades from the scene, companies will have to find other means of reaching their audiences. Some people like the idea of ads in the feed. That might work, but ultimately, more creative marketing that moves away from intrusive advertising will be more effective.

In any case, explaining RSS’s impact on the death throes of page views isn’t easy, but John Wall has done a great job with a very short screencast that makes the concept crystal clear. (John is the host of The M Show and author of the new (and terrific) Ronin Marketer blog.) Using the features of IE7, he walks you through the subscription process and how it dramatically reduces the number of actual web pages you’ll visit.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.