Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Tracking Page Views vs. Actions Alone
As a director of the Web Analytics Association (WAA), I am a huge advocate of the
standards we create. Having a look at the latest published definitions is a good starting
point.
Page View: WAA definition
Content, such as XML feeds (RSS or Atom) and emails, that can be delivered to both web
browsers and nonbrowser clients are not typically counted as page views because the request
or receipt of the content does not always correspond to the content being displayed. As an
alternative, image-based page tags can be placed inside such content to track the views of
all or portions of the content. Web server responses returning status codes indicating the
requested content was missing (400 to 499) or there was a server error (500 to 599) should not
be counted as a page view unless the web server has been configured to return a real page in
the same response with the status code. Returning a page such as a site map, search page, or
support request form instead of the default missing or error messages is configurable in the
most widely used web serving applications (Apache and IIS). Web server responses returning
status codes indicating redirection to another page (300 to 399) are also not typically counted
as page views but can be used to track events such as click-throughs with systems specifically
designed to use the redirect as a counting mechanism. Most redirect counting is done with
a status code of 302. Within the status codes that indicate a successful response (200 to 299)
there are few status codes that also may or may not be counted as a page view. The 202 status
code (Accepted) is returned in cases where the request has been accepted by the server and the
server might or might not return content to the request at a later time. It is not possible from
this response to determine if the content was ever sent, so it would typically be excluded from
page view counts. The 204 status code (No Response) tells the web browser there is no content
to return but that no error has occurred, so the browser should stay on the page prior to the
request. It is essentially a nonevent. The 206 status code (Partial Download) usually occurs with
the delivery of larger file downloads, such as PDFs. This code indicates that only a part of the
file was delivered, so it typically should not be counted as a page view. Filtering by status codes
to remove requests that should not be counted is generally needed only when processing raw
web server log files and is not usually needed in page tag-based implementations.
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If you would like to know the specifics about how Yahoo! as a vendor adheres to
the WAA standards, check out the complete compliance list on all the definitions:
http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2008/03/web-analytics-definitions-waa.html
this is not the only issue we have when implementing Ajax tracking, but it is a
good example of something that seems simple in concept but might not be as simple in
deployment.
