PageYield: The new metric for measuring online audience engagement

Posted by Ted on October 29, 2009 in | 2 comments

There was a great post on TechCrunch today about how the redesign of Yahoo has helped push up the time spent on the homepage by 20 percent. But what I found interesting wasn’t so much the effect of the tweaks Yahoo made as the quantification of their success afterward. Specifically, the idea of PageYield.

The whole focus of the redesign, and across Yahoo in general, says Bhat is to increase what he calls PageYield. The yield of a page on Yahoo is measure of how engaged consumers are with that page. (As opposed to PageRank, which is how Google scores pages on the Web in its search results). PageYield is a measure of how much time is spent on each Yahoo page and how many pageviews it gets, but also how much downstream traffic the page generates, and how often people come back.

So often when we look at building websites, we’re focussed on metrics like page views and unique visitors and time on site. But I think this concept of PageYield gets to the heart of what a website really should be aiming to do: get users to interact with it. A great page on a news site gets users to read an article, play a video, make a comment, and share to Facebook or Twitter. If the user just skims the page and moves on, so what? Sure, both count as page views and eyeballs, but if the engaged user is infinitely better.

And not just from a usability standpoint. It also makes sense if your website has an ad-supported business model. If they’re engaged with everything on the page, it follows that they’re far more engaged with advertisements, too.